it’s possible to store and recover hundreds of petabytes of data using a single gram of DNA. Each year, tens to hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies arrive in Mexico to spend the winter together in giant colonies in the mountains. If you tagged ten million of these butterflies with tiny pouches containing 5 mg of DNA storage each, the total capacity of the butterfly armada would be about 10 zettabytes—10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That’s roughly the total amount of digital data in existence in the late 2010s. If the Sun is warm, the winds are favorable, and it’s the right time
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