[tito]

I just got back from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and was marveling at the size of a small footprint facility that stores samples of more than 10% of all known living plants.

Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.

If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.

[djmips]

California has been storing the samples in its biobank since 1983 not 1930.