I sometimes wish I could say the future of technology was certain but that’s not the case. As much as I love the gadgets that I constantly see coming around, it’s the ones that are still years down the road that are really intriguing.
Technology is making its way into every crevice of our lives, almost anything that’s not biological these days has a chip or something in it. From the fridge, toaster, bathroom scale to the obvious computers, cell phones and much more. The interesting thing is that sometime in the near future this image will change as well, meaning you might not even recognize a computer anymore.
If you’re not familiar with the term Biocomputer then this might come as a shock to you. Technically it’s existed for a long time and currently the world sustains over 7 billion of them just as humans, never mind anything else that’s alive. They’re just not engineered by us humans using nanobiotechnology.
Science has made several breakthroughs in this department, it was reported in 1999 that a scientist created a simple type of calculator using leech neurons and more recently scientists have been able to store information and retrieve it from synthetic DNA. Some of the more interesting stuff is that they’ve been able to jump past binary, into ternary so instead of just using 0/1 they are now able to utilize 0/1/2 in bits of information. If you thought that was interesting then you should probably sit down for the next part. Hopefully you know what a hard drive is, if you don’t it stores information and it’s about the size of a small novel, some of the more mainstream models can store up to 4 terabytes of information. Now imagine a strand of DNA that can hold around 3 zettabytes, what’s a zettabyte don’t worry I had to look it up myself, a zettabyte is equivalent to 1,073,741,824 terabytes. Hopefully you’ve been around computers long enough to realize that just a terabyte holds a lot of information, for those that haven’t a typical DVD holds up to 4 gigabytes (1024 gigabytes go into a terabyte) and a Blu-ray holds up to 25 gigabytes. So now imagine 43,980,465,111 of your high quality videos available on Blu-ray put into something you’d have to use a microscope to see. Now that you have a better understanding of what is, can you image a leaf from a tree being smarter than us, I can.
Take it a step further and something as simple as a tree could house all the information in the world and then some. If this could be powered by CO2 and sunlight, that would just make it all that more amazing. The future of technology is somewhat uncertain I guess in the sense that it still has room to evolve beyond anything we might even imagine but one thing is for certain as long as we are here so will Technology be…
Sources/Releated Links
DNA Storage
Biocomputer