Jackson Wagner comments on Why Genetic Rescue

[Jackson Wagner]

I like this idea and so did FTX when they gave it an honorable mention in the Future Fund Project Ideas competition. Biobanking the DNA of many species in a robust/​resilient way, in addition to preserving other kinds of valuable information for the long-term, seems like a great way to make the long-term future a little bit better, quite cheaply, and with very limited downside. As you describe, the sequencing is basically already happening (albeit it could happen faster) -- it seems like would be very cheap for EA to leverage this existing progress by creating data vaults of some kind where this valuable info could be robustly stored in many locations/​formats to ensure its availability to future generations:

In ancient Sumeria, clay tablets recording ordinary market transactions were considered disposable. But today’s much larger and wealthier civilization considers them priceless for the historical insight they offer. By the same logic, if human civilization millennia from now becomes a flourishing utopia, they’ll probably wish that modern-day civilization had done a better job at resiliently preserving valuable information. For example, over the past 120 years, around 1 vertebrate species has gone extinct each year, meaning we permanently lose the unique genetic info that arose in that species through millions of years of evolution.

There are many existing projects in this space—like the internet archive, museums storing cultural artifacts, and efforts to protect endangered species. But almost none of these projects are designed robustly enough to last many centuries with the long-term future in mind. Museums can burn down, modern digital storage technologies like CDs and flash memory aren’t designed to last for centuries, and many critically endangered species (such as those which are “extinct in the wild” but survive in captivity) would likely go extinct if their precarious life-support breeding programs ever lost funding or were disrupted by war/​disaster/​etc. We’re potentially interested in funding new, resilient approaches to storing valuable information, including the DNA sequences of living creatures.