Looks can be deceiving.

Visual content isn’t always what it represents. Subliminal messages underline the visual perspective we all see. Just like code, given information isn’t always relative to that of its inner context. Through Gleick’s book he explained different relations between what we perceive of certain information and what it actually means. Through the presentation and in class discussion we were also allowed to discuss the importance and difference between what we see and what it really stands for.

I decided to further investigate the concept of information and context. My research brought me upon this article called Communicating with Aliens through DNA by Christina Agapakis. What caught my attention wasn’t the Alien idea because I’m still under the actually reality that there might be life in other galaxies but that’s not the important part. What went through this article was the mere idea that information can be stored in large quantities through DNA itself. I knew that DNA had immense quantities of information stored in it because DNA is what defines. The concept that threw me off a little was that of the fact that we could store information in too. The idea these scientist had was that maybe we could send out some information regarding our current lifestyle to space and hopefully into the hands of aliens. Of course this sounds a little weird but the concept is still ideal as these aliens will have to decrypt a source of DNA and read about what we’ve done with our planet. Information is everywhere and now humans are looking into the ideas of transporting these details through strands of DNA. Science fiction? Maybe so. But the idea of storing information is brilliant and could be useful in other areas more suitable or possible for at least this time being. Information is encoded everywhere it is up to us to decipher it. 

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/oscillator/2012/08/18/dna-code/