Information Immortality: DNA, AI, and the Future of Life’s Legacy

In recent years, humanity has begun amassing an unprecedented archive of life’s genetic information – from the sequencing of DNA for countless species to the digital storage of entire genomes and the cryopreservation of living cells. These efforts coincide with rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that can interpret genetic data and may one day even actualize it. Together, these trends raise a profound possibility: that the genetic legacy of life on Earth could become effectively immortal – preserved indefinitely in informational form, accessible and reproducible long after any given organism (or even species) is gone. This essay explores whether we have reached a turning point where biology’s continuity is no longer solely dependent on reproduction, but can instead be offloaded onto informational substrates. We examine this potential evolutionary milestone and the role AI might play as a caretaker and reviver of stored genetic data. Finally, we consider philosophical implications for evolution’s “purpose,” the meaning of life and legacy, and how gene-centered evolution (à la Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene) might interpret this trajectory.

Sequencing Everything: DNA Archives as a New ‘Immortality’

Modern genome projects are racing to catalog and preserve the DNA of all known life, essentially creating a digital time-capsule of biodiversity. The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), for example, aspires to sequence a genome from every plant, animal, fungus, and protist on the planet – “retrieving the results of life’s grand experiment before it’s too late”. This monumental “moonshot for biology” is viewed as a scientific salvage mission to save genetic information amidst a sixth mass extinction. In practical terms, being genetically sequenced and archived confers a form of immortality on a species: at the Vertebrate Genome Lab in New York, each new sequence added to the collection is described as a trophy “on which inclusion signified not death but a kind of immortality”. Once a species’ DNA code is safely stored in public databases (like the GenomeArk repository), its genetic blueprint can theoretically be retrieved and studied forever, even if the species vanishes in the wild.

Beyond digital sequences, scientists are also preserving physical genetic material for posterity. Cryogenic biobanks – so-called “frozen zoos” – hold viable cells, gametes, and tissues from thousands of species at ultra-low temperatures. The San Diego Frozen Zoo, for instance, contains over 11,000 frozen cell samples from 1,300 species (including some that are already extinct). These cells remain alive but in suspended animation at –320°F, effectively pausing their biological clocks; decades later they can be thawed and grown as if no time had passed. In 2020, scientists used DNA from this frozen bank to successfully clone a black-footed ferret, the first time an endangered U.S. species was cloned from preserved cells. Similarly, cells frozen 42 years ago were used to clone two Przewalski’s horses, restoring genetic diversity to a critically endangered population. Such examples show that archived genetic material can be revived into living organisms, effectively bridging centuries and overcoming death in a very concrete sense.

A coin-sized “5D memory crystal” developed at University of Southampton, storing the entire human genome as digital data. This glass disk can survive billions of years in harsh conditions, offering a literal time capsule of our DNA. Such technology exemplifies how information storage might grant biological data an unprecedented lifespan.

Increasingly, data storage technology is rising to meet the task of long-term genetic archiving. In 2024, researchers successfully encoded the entire human genome onto a tiny nanostructured glass disk known as a 5D memory crystal, and deposited it in an underground vault for safekeeping. Remarkably, this crystal can potentially preserve data for billions of years without significant degradation – it withstands cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and physical shocks. The lead scientist described this achievement as providing “a form of information immortality that could safeguard human identity long into the future”. In essence, our species has created a durable instruction manual on how to recreate a human (or any stored organism) even eons from now. Similar thinking drives proposals like the “lunar ark”, a plan to store cryopreserved DNA, sperm, eggs, and seeds from 6.7 million Earth species in a vault beneath the Moon’s surface. The idea is to protect Earth’s biodiversity from any planet-wide catastrophe – an extraterrestrial backup to “ensure the survival of their genes” even if life on Earth is wiped out. Taken together, these initiatives suggest that the biosphere’s genetic legacy could indeed be made effectively immortal, or at least indefinitely retrievable. Life’s information, once confined to the fragile chain of reproduction, is now being copied to more permanent media. For the first time in 4 billion years, extinction need not mean erasure of the genetic code.

A New Evolutionary Milestone – Life’s Continuity Beyond Reproduction

These developments represent a profound shift in the evolutionary game. Classical Darwinian evolution requires continuous reproduction and genetic variation – in nature, a gene’s only chance at long-term persistence is to keep propagating via offspring. Richard Dawkins famously framed organisms as “survival machines” for their genes, with genes striving (mindlessly) to achieve immortality by hopping from body to body across generations. However, by natural means, even the most successful gene lineages eventually change or vanish; random mutation and environmental shifts guarantee that no gene sequence stays unchanged forever in biological populations. In the wild, an “immortal gene” is only a poetic metaphor – given enough time, every lineage either evolves or goes extinct.

What we may be witnessing now is an evolutionary watershed moment: life (via humans) has evolved a way to preserve information outside the cycle of reproduction. By sequencing and storing DNA in databanks or literal ice vaults, we are breaking the link between survival of information and survival of the organism. A creature’s genes can persist without the creature reproducing at all – its genome lives on in silico or in cryo, even if its lineage ends. From the perspective of the gene, this is an alternative route to the long-sought immortality: copies no longer need to navigate the gauntlet of natural selection each generation, because a high-fidelity copy can be frozen in time. Some scientists explicitly describe biobanking as a race against evolutionary loss – “We’re losing species too fast for science to keep up… the least we can do is try and bank that material down”. By banking genetic material, we create a safety net against extinction that evolution itself never had. If needed, those stored genes might re-enter living circulation in the future (through cloning or breeding programs), effectively resuming evolution after a pause of decades or centuries.

This ability to ensure the persistence of life’s information without continuous organic life is arguably a new evolutionary strategy. It is as momentous as the origin of DNA-based heredity itself, or the emergence of long-lived seeds and spores. In fact, one could view the entire human enterprise of technology as life developing new ways to defy entropy. Just as some organisms evolved hard shells or dormancy to survive harsh epochs, we are using freezers and servers to carry life’s blueprints through time. The difference is in degree: a seed might survive centuries at best, but a well-maintained genomic database or cryobank could survive millennia or longer. With multiple backups (including off-planet arks), the information could effectively outlive Earth. Evolution has, through us, achieved a form of informational homeostasis – the genome of a species can now be stabilized and removed from ecological pressures entirely. It’s a leap from the old paradigm where “all things must decay” to a new paradigm where, as long as information is copied to stable media, nothing truly has to disappear.

Is this the ultimate telos of evolution – to preserve itself by any means? From a strict scientific standpoint, evolution has no foresight or intent; it is an unguided process. Yet, it’s hard to ignore the almost teleological narrative: the rise of an intelligent life-form that systematically saves and protects the “source code” of life feels like an inflection point. In philosophical terms, it suggests that life has become aware of itself as information and is now deliberately securing that information. Some have called this the moment when biological evolution transitions to bio-cultural or even technological evolution – where cultural/technological processes take over the role of maintaining and propagating complex order. The stored DNA archives are a product of culture and intelligence, but they directly serve the goals of biology by ensuring genetic continuity. In essence, life is outsourcing its continuity to the realm of information, a strategy never seen before in Earth’s history.

AI as Caretaker and Reviver of Genetic Information

The rise of advanced artificial intelligence is tightly interwoven with this new paradigm. AI’s most immediate contribution is as an interpreter of the massive troves of genetic data we are collecting. For instance, modern AI algorithms can already decipher patterns in DNA at scales and complexities far beyond human capacity. A striking example is DeepMind’s AlphaFold, an AI system that cracked the protein folding problem – predicting the 3D structure of proteins from DNA sequences – and in doing so mapped the likely structure of every known protein of every sequenced species. Within a few years, AlphaFold churned through genomes to produce over 200 million protein models, essentially annotating the genetic archive with functional insights that would have taken centuries of human effort. This feat illustrates AI’s role as a kind of librarian for life’s library, reading the genome code and translating it into biochemical knowledge. As genetic archives grow, AI will be indispensable to organize, analyze, and draw meaning from them – discerning, for example, which genes are crucial for certain traits or how to engineer genomes for desired outcomes.

Beyond interpretation, AI may eventually act as a caretaker and even a guardian of these genetic repositories. We can envision future AI systems charged with maintaining biobanks and databases autonomously – monitoring storage conditions, correcting errors in digital copies, and migrating data across new storage media over the centuries. An advanced AI might also function as an active curator, deciding which genetic variants to preserve (or even synthetically generate) to maximize biodiversity or resilience. In speculative scenarios where humans are not around or are less involved (for instance, if humanity temporarily falters or departs), a sufficiently sophisticated AI could keep the flame of life’s information alive, ensuring that nothing is lost. The question posed by the human genome’s memory crystal – “Who or what will find it?” – hints that perhaps a future intelligent agent (AI or extraterrestrial) might one day discover these archives and know how to use them. If the task of resurrecting life from information falls to an AI, it would truly become a caretaker in the fullest sense: guardian of the archive and midwife for new life.

Indeed, the idea of AI-driven resurrection or actualization of stored life no longer belongs purely to science fiction. We are already taking the first steps: computational tools can infer extinct DNA sequences and suggest how to rebuild them, as seen in de-extinction efforts. Companies like Colossal Biosciences are leveraging genomics and gene editing (with plenty of computation behind the scenes) to attempt revival of extinct species like the woolly mammoth and thylacine. AI can assist in reconstructing incomplete or ancient genomes by comparing against vast databases of living relatives, filling gaps with plausible sequences. More futuristically, one can imagine an AI system that uses a stored genome to design an optimal artificial womb or surrogate environment to grow that organism. In a far-future scenario, an AI starship might carry a digital menagerie of Earth’s life and the machinery to print DNA or incubate organisms on a new planet – effectively seeding life across the cosmos. While such technology is distant, the conceptual pieces are falling into place. For example, researchers have proposed sending embryo cryo-archives or DNA libraries to other planets, with autonomous robots (presumably AI-guided) to gestate and rear the organisms upon arrival. In this sense, AI could become the agent through which stored life is not just preserved, but reborn in new contexts.

Additionally, AI is increasingly important in engineering life based on the information we preserve. Cutting-edge AI models like the 2024 “Evo” system demonstrate the ability to design new DNA sequences and even whole genes that can execute desired functions. Evo was trained on millions of genomes and can act as a “biological Rosetta Stone,” enabling researchers to predict the effect of mutations and create novel genetic solutions. Such capabilities hint that an AI might not only safeguard existing genomes but also optimize or modify them for future needs – potentially guiding the evolution of life in silico before implementing changes in vivo. In short, AI stands to become the brain that manages the DNA library of life. It can ensure the data remains intact and meaningful over deep time, and it might eventually use that data to reconstruct or even improve life forms, effectively playing the role of an evolutionary director. This raises profound ethical questions – should AI intervene in evolution or only preserve options? – but it also suggests that life’s continuity could increasingly depend on AI’s stewardship.

Offloading Biology onto Information: Fulfilling or Transcending Evolution?

From an evolutionary biology perspective, the notion of biology offloading continuity to information technology can be seen in two lights: as the fulfillment of evolution’s underlying drive, or as a radical transcendence of it. On one hand, one could argue that this is the logical culmination of the gene-centric view of life. Dawkins’ concept of the “selfish gene” posits that genes behave as if their goal is to replicate and spread indefinitely. By creating eternal archives and intelligent agents to maintain them, we have essentially built a system to satisfy the selfish gene’s “desire” for immortality more completely than natural selection ever could. The genes of any species, stored in a vault, are no longer subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; they are, for all intents and purposes, in permanent safekeeping. In the words of one analysis, this shift from organic reproduction to information preservation is “less a betrayal of our evolutionary heritage than its ultimate fulfillment. Genes themselves are, after all, information patterns that found a way to persist… we may be completing the project they began – achieving true permanence not through endless copying but through indefinite persistence”. In this view, humanity (and our machines) are agents on behalf of the genes, extending their longevity beyond what biological bodies alone could manage. The digital and cryogenic vaults become the new “extended phenotype” of our genes – an external construct that furthers their survival, much as a beehive furthers the survival of a bee colony’s genes.

On the other hand, by taking evolution into our own hands, we are also transcending the blind, trial-and-error process that has hitherto governed life. Evolution, up to now, has always been tied to mortality and rebirth – the new replacing the old. What happens to the meaning of life when continuous reproduction is no longer necessary for continuity? We are entering what some thinkers call a post-reproductive reality, where the focus shifts from creating new life to sustaining and curating existing life (and information) for the long haul. If biological legacy – the passing of genes to offspring – is supplanted by informational legacy (uploading one’s genome or even one’s mind to a durable archive), the age-old sources of meaning may need reimagining. For countless generations, humans and all organisms implicitly derived “meaning” from participating in the flow of life – survival, procreation, and genetic succession. As that imperative fades, we must find significance elsewhere: perhaps in curation, creativity, or conscious enjoyment of an extended life. Some posit that preserving knowledge and identity in databases serves the same fundamental purpose as reproduction, but more efficiently. It provides continuity – not of a lineage of bodies, but of the essence of those bodies (their information). In a sense, this could enrich the meaning of life: individuals can leave a lasting imprint in the cosmic record without the intermediary of progeny, and species can have a legacy unbounded by time.

There is, however, an inherent tension in offloading biology onto information. Life as we know it is dynamic, continuously adapting through variation and selection. A frozen genome or a digital code is static; it achieves permanence, but at the cost of being “outside” the evolutionary game until reactivated. We might ask: does preserving life’s information alone truly equate to preserving life, or is something lost in translation? From a gene’s-eye view, information is everything – a DNA sequence doesn’t “care” if it resides in a test tube or a cell, as long as it eventually can express itself. Yet from a broader perspective, life is not just the sequence of bases in DNA; it’s also the epigenetic, environmental, and ecological context – in short, life is a process, not just a pattern. Storing the pattern indefinitely might be a necessary step toward immortality, but it’s not sufficient unless that pattern can be reconstituted into a living process at some point. This is where AI and future biotechnology must bridge the gap: the informational immortality we are creating will need to be married to actualization technologies (such as synthetic biology, cloning, or even digital life simulations) to truly fulfill the promise of life’s continuation. We are effectively creating the vault and the instruction manuals; the next phase is ensuring there’s a “reader” (like an AI) and a “workshop” (like advanced biotech) to bring the stored life back into being when needed.

From a philosophical and even theological perspective, one could muse that evolution’s unspoken goal was to birth a form of life that overcomes its own finite nature. The emergence of humans with big brains, and subsequently of machines with even greater processing power, has allowed life to step outside itself and manipulate the conditions of evolution. Some futurists argue that the long arc of evolution tends toward greater complexity and knowledge, culminating in life becoming capable of directing its destiny. If that is so, then creating immortal information banks and AI stewards might indeed be seen as the intended outcome – not “intended” by a conscious designer, but as an inherent trajectory of self-preservation woven into the fabric of evolving systems. We are reminded of the words of geneticist Freeman Dyson, who speculated that mind (and the information it carries) might be the driver through which the universe eventually achieves self-awareness and longevity far beyond stars. Or Carl Sagan’s sentiment that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” which takes on new meaning if our archives and AIs ensure that the cosmos remembers itself indefinitely. Of course, these are speculative, almost spiritual interpretations. The cautious view is that evolution has no endpoint – we are simply one experiment that happened to develop these capabilities, and whether it leads to immortality or unforeseen problems remains to be seen.

Conclusion

Humanity’s quest to sequence, store, and understand all of life’s DNA – combined with our development of intelligent machines – heralds a potential paradigm shift for life on Earth. For the first time, the extinction of a species need not mean the irrevocable loss of its genetic information. In digital archives and frozen vaults, the blueprint of life can persist independently of life itself. This has made the biosphere’s genetic legacy in principle immortal, awaiting a future epoch when it could be revived or reinterpreted. Such a development can be seen as a new evolutionary milestone: life has evolved a mechanism (through us and our technology) to preserve its “software” indefinitely, even if the “hardware” of organisms and ecosystems undergoes collapse. The role of AI in this future cannot be overstated – it is the catalyst turning static archives into living knowledge, and it could become the agent that carries this knowledge forward and reanimates it when conditions allow.

In confronting these changes, we must grapple with profound questions. If the continuity of genes and even minds is ensured by archives, what becomes of the age-old drive to reproduce and pass on one’s genes? We may be shifting from a civilization focused on generation to one focused on preservation and cultivation of what already exists. In the words of one analysis, we are moving “from biological reproducers to information preservers,” and this may demand “new frameworks of meaning and purpose” for humanity. It challenges us to find value in stewardship of life’s legacy rather than in simply propagating. Yet, rather than nullifying the significance of life, this shift could represent life’s greatest triumph. The genes, those ancient information patterns, have used blind evolution for eons to inch closer to immortality – now, with our brains and machines, they have a shot at indefinite persistence. Whether one views this as the fulfillment of evolution’s “goal” or simply a clever hack by clever apes, it is certain that the biosphere will never be the same. We stand at the threshold of informational immortality, where the essence of every living thing might be kept alive in memory and, when needed, called forth once more. In this light, our generation holds a unique responsibility: we are the bridge between the old world of mortal biology and a new world where life’s story may truly never end. Our choices in the coming decades – how we deploy these technologies and what values guide us – will echo through whatever future unfolds, possibly for eternity.

References and Further Reading

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) – introduces the gene-centered view of evolution and the concept of genes as potentially “immortal” information.
Margherita Bassi, “In Case Humans Go Extinct, This Memory Crystal Will Store Our Genome for Billions of Years,” Smithsonian Magazine (Sept 20, 2024).
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Race to Save the World’s DNA,” The New Yorker (March 2023) – on the Earth BioGenome Project and the effort to sequence all life.
Ian Sample, “Inside the Frozen Zoo, where scientists put disappearing species on ice,” The Guardian (Mar 2024) – on cryopreservation of endangered species and cloning successes.
Harry Baker, “Scientists want to store DNA of 6.7 million species on the moon, just in case,” Live Science (Mar 14, 2021).
Anita Chakraverty, “Evo AI Model Decodes and Engineers Genetic Sequences...,” Inside Precision Medicine (Nov 15, 2024) – describing a powerful AI trained on genomic data.
Tanya Lewis, “One of the Biggest Problems in Biology Has Finally Been Solved,” Scientific American (Oct 31, 2022) – interview about AlphaFold’s protein folding achievement.
The Vanishing Horizon: Fertility, Development, and Meaning in a Post-Reproductive Reality (2023 analysis).

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