By Futurist Thomas Frey
We are still a long ways away from being able to do this, but over time we will begin to understand the entire data set inside a single kernel of wheat. What role does every molecule play? What role do external forces play on its development?
This will be a project exponentially more complicated than the Human Genome Project, and it may be too complicated to start with wheat, but eventually we will get there. Once we can successfully map wheat, we can work on far more complicated organisms including animals and humans.
The Every-Atom Mapping Project sounds absurd—documenting the position, state, and interactions of every single atom in a kernel of wheat. But so did sequencing the human genome in 1990. That project took 13 years and $3 billion to map 3 billion base pairs. Today, you can sequence a genome in hours for under $1,000.
The every-atom map is vastly more ambitious. A kernel of wheat contains approximately 10^23 atoms—that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Each one has position, velocity, bonding state, and electromagnetic properties that change constantly. Documenting this makes the genome project look trivial.
But impossible projects become possible when technology advances exponentially. And the payoff for understanding matter at atomic resolution would be transformative beyond anything we’ve achieved.
Continue reading… “Mapping Every Atom in a Kernel of Wheat: The Next Impossible Project”