A few months back I raised the knotty question of archiving large collections of photographs for posterity. Most responses dealt with the short term solutions, like my RAID system. Nobody had confidence that any electronic system could be relied on for decades, let alone centuries.
I would be interested to hear what you think about DNA encoding, which is the subject of a scientific paper in Nature this week - and a lot of articles in the Press. The authors in Cambridge (England) seemed to have solved the problem of detecting and correcting the rare errors that occur during encoding and reading (parity bits and triplication). They point out that DNA code can be read after thousands of years, and that devices for reading DNA code will always be widely available.
The prototype archiving system reported this week is unaffordable for photographers, but that impediment is likely to disappear within a decade or so, judging by experience with the human genome project.
It sounds like a reliable archiving system for photography based on DNA encoding will become available in our time. Comments?
Goff