Perhaps the most powerful encryption system on the planet, and one certainly exceeding any technical or mechanical invention of the last century, is DNA. In an object too small to be seen by the naked eye, gigabytes and terabytes of genetic information are chemically housed.
The data thus stored includes not only an exhaustive description of a complex biological structure, but much more: the developmental processes needed to create that structure, and plans for how that structure will respond to thousands of possible circumstances.
This amazingly efficient data encryption system is the envy of every hardware engineer. Ken Brown writes:
DNA, as well as the protein machines it codes for, possesses “complex specified information” (abbreviated, incidentally, CSI). This means it is both highly improbable (complex) and conforms to an independent pattern (specified).
A single drop of blood from a mouse contains data which is encrypted, stored, and retrievable in ways superior to the best current supercomputers.
The future of hardware may be found in the study of how data is stored in genetic material. This would open the door to a “memory explosion” of huge dimensions - memory wildly more efficient than any current hardware, and eventually perhaps at lower prices.
The question to be posed is whether it is possible, in fact or in principle, for humans to replicate the encryption used in chromosomes. Can this system of codification be synthesized?
