I’d be kind of surprised if this one hasn’t been asked before, but…what would be the best way/chance, if any, of preserving an organism’s DNA for 65+ million years, non-technologically?
That is, under conditions that could be found or maintained in nature, on Earth. So no launching into space at some large fraction of c, no sequencing and encoding the genetic information as a radio signal, or as binary code inscribed as twenty-foot notches in a giant slab of pure tungsten, etc.
Exotic or unlikely is okay, as long as it’s not completely impossible, could preserve DNA in a state that you’d have at least a decent chance of cloning the organism.
(And before anyone asks…the reason is because I can’t sneak dinosaur eggs into the time machine. The customs people have been watching me like a hawk.)
My instinct would be to take a sample of tissue – perhaps tooth or something pretty robust, set it in resin in an argon atmosphere, seal it in a metal container impervious to oxygen. I think I would go for something pretty inert. Platinum would be my initial choice but sealing the container without heating could be difficult. Maybe gold would be easier. Then once it was sealed I would dump it in Antarctica.
There are obvious problems with this set-up and I am sure that someone else would have some better ideas. But that’s my best initial thought.
It is a long time since I saw it, but I seem to recall blood sucking insects, that had just sucked some dinosaur blood that got trapped in tree resin that then got fossilized into amber. (Whether that would actually work, of course, even as well as it worked in the movie, is another matter.)
j_sum1, the OP asks for non-technological preservation.
Yep. JP was what came immediately to mind. The presentation in the movie is implausible however. ISTR that DNA recovered from insects buried in amber is limited to that insect’s own DNA and runs to only a few dozen base pairs.
I interpreted non-tech differently from you. Based on the OP’s examples I took it to mean storage of actual DNA on Earth. That is, no transposing and storage of the data in computer or other form. It has to be actual DNA. No storage off the planet. It has to be Earth conditions.
Anyway, I see problems with my scenario. Chiefly that even Antarctic ice is not expected to last forever. And it is mobile. Even if all other reactants are kept from the sample, DNA will degrade over time at normal earth temperatures.
These guys calculated that DNA only has a 521 year half life in bone. You can probably squeeze some more time out of it by locking the DNA in some sort of matrix but 65 million years is a long time.
From the article:
Unless you can somehow sustain cryogenic conditions (I assume launching it into orbit at say the L2 point so it’s out of the sun is not an option), I would think the only way would be to have an active maintenance and error correction system, like cloning it into some slow growing bacteria. Even then you’ll probably accumulate too many mutations over 65 million years even in the best case scenario.
You’re going to want redundancy. Find as many methods as you can, use as many methods as you can on each sample (say, embedding in crystallized resin, and then locking the resin into a polar glacier), and have many samples, stored in many different places and geological conditions.
Resin is likely to break down or gassify into a volatile hydrocarbon in a few thousand years. But surprisingly, you have fossils embedded in amber 230 million years old, older than the dinos. If the resin can turn into stable amber or resinite and be preserved that long, then some the organic component of the animal may be preserved and is therefore NOT a fossil.
Continental drift. 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, Antarctica wasn’t frozen. Antarctica didn’t even start to freeze until the Drake Passage opened up a mere 23 million years ago.
