The Epic Project to Record the DNA of All Life on Earth

Advances in biotechnology over the past decade have brought rapid progress in the fields of medicine, food, ecology, and neuroscience, among others. With this progress comes ambition for even more progress—realizing we’re capable of, say, engineering crops to yield more food means we may be able to further engineer them to be healthier, too. Building a brain-machine interface that can read basic thoughts may mean another interface could eventually read complex thoughts.

One of the fields where progress seems to be moving especially quickly is genomics, and with that progress, ambitions have grown just as fast. The Earth BioGenome project, which aims to sequence the DNA of all known eukaryotic life on Earth, is a glowing example of both progress and ambition.

A recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science released new details about the project. It’s estimated to take 10 years, cost $4.7 billion, and require more than 200 petabytes of digital storage space (a petabyte is one quadrillion, or 10¹⁵ bytes).