Nice try but your comparison is fallacious. Lined college ruled paper is not digital.
Digital: of, relating to, or being data in the form of digits, especially binary digits <digital images> <a digital readout>; especially : of, relating to, or employing digital communications signals.
Can your paper do this?
To think so is utterly absurd. It's beyond hopeful.
The sequence:
The book absolutely makes a case for an intelligent agent being responsible for the digital code in dna.
Perhaps if there was a certain similarity. However:
Regardless of it's potential uses, it bears no significant similarity to (e.g.) networks of copper/iron alloyed pathways etched in silicon, be they part of, say, a flash memory device, or any particular example of digital circuitry.
Maybe you should get out of the house more often:
"Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.
It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.
Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored."
Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram | ExtremeTech
And, so, again:
It's not surprising in any sense that storing information on the molecular level is much more efficient than common examples of digital information storage.
But the fact that you can take the amount of information that, say, DNA can represent, and convert it into units of digital information (8-bit numbers in sequence) does not mean that it has any similarity to digital storage.
You could also convert those numbers into the amount of college ruled sheets of lined paper that it would take to represent the same data, and it wouldn't mean that DNA had some resemblance to paper.
And to think so is utterly absurd. It's beyond hopeful.
DNA computing is fundamentally similar to parallel computing in that it takes advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once.[8] For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. Furthermore, particular mathematical computations have been demonstrated to work on a DNA computer. As an example, Aran Nayebi[9] has provided a general implementation of Strassen's matrix multiplication algorithm on a DNA computer, although there are problems with scaling. In addition, Caltech researchers have created a circuit made from 130 unique DNA strands, which is able to calculate the square root of numbers up to 15.[10] Source: Wiki
Finally, please provide me with an example of another molecule, exclusive of any in the cell, that exists in nature that can be used for digital information storage.
This doesn't follow from the last, which is a response to a collection of statistics on the information capacity of DNA. The second to last quote is still true, and is relevant if that was what the preceding post was to mean that the fact that it (DNA) has some information storage capacity, and that this amount can be converted into other units possibly in a differing number base, like terabytes, or number of blu-ray discs, does not mean it is similar, or has similar origins, in the context of the above sequence.
The information capacity of DNA can be represented as an amount of terabytes. This does not mean it is similar to, or has similar origins to any example of digital circuitry for encoding information, e.g. a flash drive, or HDD, or SSD, or (as below) optical disc.
The information capacity of DNA can be represented as an amount of blu-ray discs. This does not mean it is similar to, or has similar origins to any kind of optical disc, i.e. (simply) layers of plastic and metal with pits and bumps burned into one or more layers by a kind of laser.
The information capacity of DNA can be represented as the amount of college-ruled sheets of lined paper in a given size font which would be required to encode the relevant information into base-2 numbers (or base-4 as is more applicable to DNA) written in some consistent fashion, with arabic numerals. This does not mean it is similar to, or has similar origins to any kind of mixture of wood, pulped, desaturated, cooked, colored, and on which lines of ink are placed as to draw symbols.
Finally, that it can be used to create what is known as a curcuit does not mean it is similar to, or has similar origins to, a curcuit made of some other material(s). That two things can be called by the same name in the same sentence or otherwise does not mean they are similar or have similar origins.
In the context of the preceding sequence.
And to think so is both hopeful and absurd.
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