Genome readers are improving, getting cheaper, faster, and smaller, and genome sequencing becomes cheaper every year, too. What you store today in your iPhone for virtually nothing would cost many millions of dollars in 1982." There's reason to think the price will continue to fall. "But look how much magnetic storage cost in the 1980s. "Of course it is expensive," Zhirnov says. To become useful in a widespread way, the price per megabyte needs to plummet. Erlich said the work his team did cost $7,000 to encode and decode two megabytes of data. In 2017, Columbia University researchers Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski made the process 60 percent more efficient. Their method only produced 1.28 petabytes per gram of DNA, however, a volume exceeded the next year when a group encoded all 154 Shakespeare sonnets and a 26-second clip of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Researchers first succeeded in encoding data onto DNA in 2012, when Harvard University geneticists George Church and Sri Kosuri wrote a 52,000-word book on A, C, G, and T base pairs. And all it needs for storage is a cool, dark place, a significant energy savings when compared to server farms that require huge amounts of energy to run and even more energy to cool. Consider how the human body is constantly writing and rewriting DNA, and does so on a couple thousand calories a day. Writing DNA can be an energy-efficient process, too. Any information you can map in bits you can store in DNA." It's so dense - able to store a theoretical maximum of 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram - that all the data ever produced could be stored in the back of a tractor trailer truck. It's incredibly dense, many, many thousands of times denser than the densest technology that we have today. "DNA is a molecular storage medium that is remarkable. "Nature has nailed it," Luis Ceze, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, says. Zhirnov and other scientists are looking at the human body, looking to DNA. The race is on to find another medium capable of storing massive amounts of information in as small a space as possible. By 2050, we're going to need to store 10 to the 30 bits, compared to 10 to the 23 bits in 2016." That amount of storage space is equivalent to each of the world's seven billion people owning almost six trillion - that's 10 to the 12th power - iPhone Xs with 256GB storage space. "We are facing a crisis that's comparable to the oil crisis in the 1970s. We have reached the physical limits," Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist at the Semiconductor Research Corporation, says. It's unlikely that we can make flash memory smaller. "There won't be enough silicon to store all the data we need.