Comparison between DNA and computer chips:
- Material: primarily Carbon in DNA vs. Silicon in chips. Carbon is lighter.
- Numbering systems: quaternary in DNA vs. binary in chips.
- Nano technology: minimum element size in DNA is 0.34 nm vs. 14 nm in chips. That is 1:41 ratio. As computer chips are scaled down even further, they will hit the brick wall which the quantum effect will come into play. Drastic change in chip design will have to be made to scale down to the atomic level that DNA structure has employed for millions of years. This 1:41 ratio however doesn’t compare unit cell sizes. The densest storage media currently available in the market is hard drives. It can reach 1 Tbits/in2. That translates to 645.16 nm2 per bit. Whereas for the DNA to store one bit it only takes 0.884 nm2 . (0.34nm x 2.6 nm) Considering just the areal density, it is a ratio of 729.82 : 1 between DNA bit density and that of the densest hard drive in the market. If we take volume density into consideration, that ratio will even be higher.
- Expandability: Computer chips don’t grow, marry and bear children. DNA structure does. And with DNA structure it evolves into human beings who can fathom the past and the future and from beneath the earth to the end of the universe! The creation from the DNA structure have the urge to seek the one who created them.
- 3D vs. 2D: It was only recently that our chip makers are working towards 3D chip making. But DNA structure has been implementing 3D structure for millions of years.
- DNA is environmentally safe. It is biodegradable. Whereas, it requires many poisonous chemicals in order to make modern computer chips. Plus computer chips are not biodegradable.
DNA structure has been around for millions of years and yet it appears to me much more advanced than the computer chips that we started to build from the ’70s. DNA cannot just come out of randomness by itself. Atoms that build DNA are well organized. There are exactly four building blocks of the DNA, i.e. A, T, C and G base pairs shared among all the species. DNA structure is well thought out. There must be intelligence behind the scenes that made it happen. Of course one can say that DNA came ‘naturally’. But this kind of reasoning is almost like when kids say you can get money from the ATM machines.
Yet we have very limited understanding of human or other genomes. We have mapped the genomes, element by element. In terms of computer technology, that is we have got DNA’s binary code, or more appropriately, “quaternary code” through reverse engineering. :-) Once again, in terms of computer technology, when can we get hold of DNA’s source code (such as in c++)? Or even better, DNA’s design document?
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