The human genome is stored on this tiny crystal disk, hoping future visitors will 'de-extinct' us

Somewhere deep inside a salt cave in Hallstatt, Austria, a small crystal disk stores the entire human genome. Called a “5D memory crystal,” it may hold the key to humanity’s future, while also offering a second chance for species currently on the brink of extinction. 

This silica disc, smaller than a poker chip, carries every one of the three billion letters in human DNA, locked away in a format designed to shrug off fire, ice, radiation, and the slow grind of time itself.

Its makers want it to outlast oceans, continents, and even the universe itself, ready to give future explorers a snapshot of who we were.

This bold initiative is made possible by a technological leap in data preservation. Hard drives corrode, magnetic tape demagnetizes, and cloud servers rely on electricity that must never blink.

A storage method capable of surviving billions of years pushes the conversation from quarterly backups to civilizational memory. If humanity ever blinks out, this disc could become the spark that lights the way back.

Tiny disk will protect the human genome

A single five-dimensional memory crystal holds up to 360 terabytes – enough room for roughly seventy-five million songs.

The medium is fused quartz, one of Earth’s toughest glasses, famous for shrugging off chemical attack and temperature swings.

Tests show the crystal keeps its data after heating to 1,832 °F, freezing to the cold of liquid nitrogen, or absorbing cosmic rays that would fry silicon chips.

Engineers have even pressed it with 10 tons of force per square centimeter without leaving a scar. No wonder Guinness World Records called it the most durable data storage material back in 2014.

Durability matters because information usually vanishes long before the heat death of the universe. Everyday flash memory may lose bits after a decade on the shelf.

Film yellows, parchment crumbles, and even punched tapes break their sprocket holes. In contrast, the five-dimensional approach literally engraves data inside the glass.

Tiny patterns, each only 20 nanometers wide – about one six-thousandth the width of a human hair – change how light passes through.

Those subtle tweaks can later be read with a microscope and polarized beam. Because the marks hide beneath the surface, scratches, oxidation, and mold barely touch them.

Writing in five dimensions

Writing the code is a dance of ultrafast laser pulses. Each burst lasts only a few femtoseconds – a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second – yet it leaves a permanent imprint.

The pulses create tiny voids whose orientation, size, and position encode bits in two optical axes plus three spatial coordinates. That is why technologists call it five-dimensional data.

Unlike ink, magnetic domains, or pits on a compact disc, these features stack in three-dimensional layers, using the entire volume of the glass instead of its skin.

Because the process needs pinpoint accuracy, the laser setup sits on vibration-damped tables in clean rooms. A single misaligned pulse could blur the pattern, so motion stages move in nanometer steps while real-time optics check focus.

It can take hours to write a complex file, yet the payoff is permanence.

Once sealed, the disc rests at room temperature – no batteries and no hard drive platters spinning at 7,200 rpm. In archival terms, that is invincibility on a budget.

Etching the human genome onto a disk

The idea is more than laboratory tinkering. After perfecting the technique, researchers at the Optoelectronics Research Center of the University of Southampton decided to pack humanity’s most precious dataset into a single disc.

The effort is headed by physicist Peter Kazansky, whose group has spent years refining femtosecond-laser writing. They etched the entire human genome – about 3.2 billion base pairs – into the crystal, sequencing each letter 150 times to catch errors, with help from Helixwork Technologies.

“We know from the work of others that genetic material of simple organisms can be synthesized and used in an existing cell to create a viable living specimen in a lab,” Professor Kazansky explains.

“The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored should science in the future allow.”

Those ambitions reach beyond curiosity; they sketch a plan for a biological seed bank that could survive long after today’s seed vaults crumble.

Storing the disk that holds the code

The finished disc now sits in the Memory of Mankind archive, a cavern carved into Austrian salt deposits. Above its dense planes of data lies a visual key.

The engravings show hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen; the familiar A, C, G, and T bases; a double helix; and finally a chromosome sliding into a cell.

The design assumes the finder may have no cultural reference points, only the universal language of chemistry and geometry.

Bringing humans back from extinction

It’s one thing to find the disk, but it’s another thing entirely to actually do something with it.

An alien civilization that uncovers this 5D crystal disk would hold a vast instruction set explaining how to build a human, but it will be written in an unfamiliar language.

Decoding the sequence demands mastery of molecular biology, cellular development, and epigenetics, because sequence data alone cannot produce a person.

Researchers must first synthesize flawless DNA strands, assemble them into forty-six chromosomes, position them inside a nucleus, and place that nucleus in an enucleated human egg.

Yet the embryo’s journey from zygote to adult depends on more than genetic code.

Chemical gradients, mechanical forces, and maternal hormones orchestrate the timed expression of genes that sculpt tissues and organs.

Without that context, the visitors must reconstruct life’s regulatory software, mapping how RNA and proteins fold, interact, and direct cognition and behavior.

This incredible storage disk reveals our ingredients, but not the recipe for animation. Transforming code into consciousness would resemble crafting a violin solely from sheet music.

Beyond humanity: a genetic ark

The same technology could house the genomes of mountain gorillas, Tasmanian devils, or giant sequoias – organisms edging uncomfortably close to oblivion.

A single shoebox of crystals would dwarf the capacity of today’s cold-storage DNA banks while avoiding their dependence on liquid nitrogen.

In a nod to NASA’s Pioneer plaques, Kazansky’s team etched a silhouette onto the disc’s surface as a greeting to whoever encounters it.

“The visual key inscribed on the crystal gives the finder knowledge of what data is stored inside and how it could be used,” says Professor Kazansky.

“We don’t know if memory crystal technology will ever follow these plaques in distance traveled, but each disc can be expected, with a high degree of confidence, to exceed their survival time.”

Five-dimensional crystals will not solve every backup headache, but they make one promise: once data goes in, it stays.

That promise turns a fragile string of nucleotides into a message that can cross oceans of time, waiting for minds clever enough to read it – and perhaps brave enough to breathe life into it.

This extraordinary achievement was made possible through a collaboration with Helixworks Technologies.

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