Saturday, February 9, 2008

I've been having powerful and confusing dreams. I've long had the idea that in the nanotech future information will be encoded onto microscopic spores that can later be retrieved to ensure against data loss. But what if this strategy fails to accommodate the vastness of the universe. Wouldn't the data be better ensured against loss if each of these spores were engineered to create copies of themselves if they encountered conditions favorable for doing so? But then isn't that life? What if our mysterious junk dna is itself the data primordial beings were designed to propagate and all the rest, all the instructions pertaining to the propagation machine is just the result of data corruption over time. All life on Earth would be an incidental library, with data perhaps still extractable and perhaps corrupted to the point of unusability.

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