Friday, August 19, 2016

[exvidsys] Survived by your microbiome

A traveler gets stranded on a remote planet with no hope for survival or rescue.  However, not wanting to become completely forgotten, the traveler leaves a message about his or her existence for future travelers to the planet: the challenge is long term storage of data.  The universe is very big, so it might be billions of years before another traveler chances on the message.

Although conditions are too harsh for the traveler himself or herself to survive, his or her microbiome could survive and adapt to the conditions: bacteria are resourceful.

Therefore, the traveler seeks to engineer his or her microbiome to encode a message that will survive billions of years.

Twist ending: intelligent life, the product of evolution after that engineering, examine their own DNA to decode the message.

Inspired by The Martian.

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