When you consider that we look and sometimes behave much as our hunter-gatherer forebears did, it seems fair to say that as a robust means of transmitting information through millennia, DNA can't be beat. By contrast, information stored and transmitted by human means has only rarely transcended even a fraction of that time because of the rapid mutability of technology and language. If you're not convinced, reflect on all that was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Or try reading the Old English version of Beowulf. Find an eight track tape player and pop in that Bee Gees tape. Or for a more maddening exercise, try to devise a sure-fire way to back up those precious data files so they survive a few operating system upgrades.

The fidelity of Nature's design, and the tendency for human technologies to drift toward the obsolete, has not escaped virtual-reality innovator Jaron Lanier, Columbia University professor David Sulzer, and conceptual illustrator Lisa Haney. Invited to submit an entry to a New York Times Magazine contest for designing a time capsule to reach earth's inhabitants in the year 3000, their entry did not win (though in our opinion it should have). They did, however, come up with, in the words of one judge, “the most disgustingly brilliant” entry in the competition.

Reminiscent of the speculations of Leslie Orgel and Francis Crick some 30 years ago about alien-directed panspermia using the cosmically robust T2 bacteriophage, in the time capsule proposed by Lanier and colleagues, the contents of every 1999 issue of The New York Times Magazine would be converted from the two-digit binary to the four-character genetic code, and spliced into the introns of cockroaches. Then, through a rigorous breeding program, the cockroaches of New York City would be transformed into scurrying little time capsules, copulating madly, and certainly giving earth's inhabitants of the future at least one product of biotechnology that is guaranteed to survive.