[Reporting on Nature 2.0] What if we make digital twins of all living organisms in order to replicate them?
Near Longyearbyen in the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, about 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole, you’ll find a space that is unique in the world: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. From all across the world, crates of seeds are sent here for safe and secure long-term storage in cold and dry rock vaults. Some consider it as a magic place. Some even biblical, as it reminds if Noah’s ark. Team Oddys came up with a Nature 2.0 take on what ca be considered an app store for all species.
Team Odyss was inspired by planetary challenges from the very beginning. When participating to the Hackathon, they wanted to build a commons to contribute to the fight against world hunger and food security. Autonomous operating greenhouses providing a ‘Basic Nutrition Income’ were ideas from the first few hours.
Key is to address the Nature 2.0 challenge: Not fixing the world by making everyone pay for it, but building ecosystems of abundance, so everyone can enjoy them.
On Friday evening, an idea started to emerge that first felt as a shot to the moon:
“What if we build a digital twin for every organism alive?
Yes, we could start with the organisms that are most valuable to our survival, like corn, rice and cassava (Or coffee, chocolate and weed for others) But we could not just limit us to food crops. Why not copy other species as well (trees, coral, animals, … kombucha yeast, … ) We could take it off as a sort of app store with genographic blueprints of species (DNA, RNA), and add one after the other.
Building app stores for genomic appliances is not crazy or new. As we speak, organizations like Helix or 23andme are in pole positions to become the leading commercial tech companies hosting DNA for commercial purposes. We could think of DNA-based diets (habit DNA), DNA based wine selection, traveling the routes of your ancestors based on genomics (Travel Unwrapped), etc… One-by-one commercial opportunities. Marketsandmarkets estimatedin 2018 that the first generation of applications in food could be a 20 billion dollar market in the US alone.
Odyss could take it a step further. Not only by adding historic data on how species have evolved, the conditions to make them thrive, but also by opening it up as a commons.
This 21st Century version of the Arc of Noah could be a source that could help us replicate life in the future whenever necessary. Or imagine that one day, humanity will be an inter-planetary species. Are we going to take food or seeds by cargo to Mars? We don’t think so. Digital twins and synthetic biology might one day provide the answers.
