Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> What, you mean despite the minor detail that DNA molecules slowly 
>>> decompose into simpler molecules and we're talking about animals that 
>>> lived 70,000,000 years ago? :-P
>>
>> Yep.
> 
> Riiiight. Oh well, please, don't let the laws of thermodymanics bother 
> you... ;-)
> 
Well, to be perfectly clear decomp requires either a) enough heat to 
break the molecular bonds of a material, or b) chemical reactions, 
usually microbial. If the conditions that preserve something doesn't 
produce the former, and the later is suspended or halted, then you don't 
get as "fast" a decomp. Its.. like the difference between sticking an 
book on a shelf for 500 years, or in a sealed glass case, with an inert 
gas. The former is going to disintegrate at a rate that varies a great 
deal on humidity, temperature, and if anything touches it at all, the 
later, might last a billion years, presuming the seal never fails. 
However, "some" of the legibility, structure, etc. will fail, so you get 
a very fragile, and possibly partly damaged, copy when its all over.

That said, there is also the matter that "some" DNA is more resistant to 
that erosion too, so lasts longer (in fact, one entire species, called 
water bears, could conceivably survive thousands, or maybe even 
millions, of years, in extreme dry, cold, or vacuum, and come back to 
life when the conditions allow (they don't really know how long the 
things "can" survive in a dormant state, but some revived in like... 200 
year old moss, or something). This is because the molecular bonds, sans 
anything to "actively" disrupt them, will remain "sort of" intact, and 
its possible for some configurations to be so stable, even in a 
multi-cell organism, so as to come close to making them indestructible, 
at least within a survivable range of conditions. And, finally, its 
possible from "some" structure to maybe be preserves, even if some 
replacement happens, in which case, since the replacement is likely to 
be a chemical process itself, as long as "most" of the structure is 
intact, you might be able to predict what was replaced, based on simple 
chemical rules.

All of which says only that you can possibly recover scattered fragments 
from say 5% of the animal's DNA? But, its **still** way more than 
thought possible, and enough to make "some" comparisons. The question 
comes down to, if 5% survived, is that the only 5% that "could", and if 
not, could other 5% amounts survive in other samples, eventually 
resulting in a 70-80% recovery, or some such. An amount that "may" be 
sufficient to reconstitute the original pattern (or close enough).

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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