5 minutes

From clay tablets to chains

Muhammad Salem Al Ali

August 11, 2022

More than five thousand years ago, there in Sumer, southern Iraq, the story began and mankind wrote its first cuneiform inscriptions on a group of clay tablets, which is the oldest evidence of knowledge recording in order to transfer, exchange and preserve it;

So were the hieroglyphic and hieratic writings of the ancient Egyptian civilization, which adorned the walls of temples, tombs and palaces, including papyrus, with various types of administrative, economic and religious texts;

However, the first practices of preserving knowledge in an organized manner in preparation for its retrieval date back to about 4,500 years ago, specifically at the site of Ebla in northwest Syria, where the clay tablets discovered there provided researchers with new insights about the first practices of classification and indexing processes, especially since these features were absent from the Sumerian and Egyptian discoveries. ancient and preceded by a share of time;

Then the Assyrian library of Ashurbanipal appeared in the seventh century BC, which is the first library of mankind

The journey continued through the ages, and other libraries appeared successively, and then encyclopedias and dictionaries, and with them, methods of preservation and storage developed, from walls and clay tablets to papyrus and manuscripts, then printing that recorded knowledge in volumes and books, until the age of electricity and the initiation of techniques, which brought us perforated cards. And magnetic tapes and discs, up to the present day when data is stored on digital media and discs that spread in various places and horizons.

The reality is that this data is increasing exponentially. According to Statista, humans produced nearly 2 zettabytes of data by 2010, and then jumped to 79 zettabytes in 2021;

If you know that a zettabyte is equivalent to one billion terabytes, and that the size of that data will double to 181 zettabytes in 2025, you will find that storing the data of tomorrow is one of the main challenges facing the world today.

The current storage units, although they use the most advanced technologies, suffer from several problems;

They are short-lived, have limited capacity, and are prone to rapid wear and tear and a variety of factors can wipe them off the ground.

And because science opens horizons after horizons, it sees them as old models trying to race in a field that has no limits and no end;

It is time to get off and give way to an entirely new concept based on deoxyribonucleic acid, or what is known as “DNA.” If today’s computers store binary data magnetically or on semiconductors;

The process of storage in DNA takes place in a different way, in which it encodes long chains of "nucleotides", which are organic molecules that are the basic units in the structure of "DNA".

This promising technology is able to store all the world’s data in an area that does not exceed one room, and can withstand heat and cold and various conditions as well, and the data stored in it can last between 700 thousand and one million years, which far exceeds the life of any current storage technology.

Yes, there are still many obstacles, the most important of which is the high cost and slowness in writing and retrieving data, which makes this method currently useful in long-term archiving;

However, tomorrow is coming with its innovations and solutions, and there must be a day when it becomes fast, efficient and accessible to all.

Founder of Suhail Smart Solutions

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