I would assume you'd want that digital archive in a vault for the same reasons we put seeds kn the seed vault. Like the seed vault, the only copy doesn't need to (nor should it) exist just in the vault, but that's a good location to make sure at least one copy survives.
I'm still talking about how hard it is... just for the 7000 known species of lizards.
"We show that as of June 2021, 3,278 unique animals have had their nuclear genome sequenced and the assembly made publicly available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database (10). This translates to 0.2% of all animal species."
It's a huge project! Just lizards are double the number of complete screens we have.
We should definitely try and get the tech going. It will have uses to recover even endangered species in the near future, but it's not a smart use of our resources for saving us "after" something happens.
Well, you said digital, but that's not the only way to do it. Blood in a stabilizer of some sort (if it exists) or some other carrier of genetic material was more along the lines of what I meant. That's much easier to do (maybe? I'm not sure what it takes to stabilize it over a long time frame), but takes a lot more physical space.
I agree it's not something that is necessarily immediately useful right after a problem, but it's something better to have than not. Reconstructing the wooly mammoth DNA required filling in somewhat large gaps with elephant DNA if I recall correctly, so even if we are able to resurrect the wooly mammoth with it, it won't really be a wooly mammoth, it will be mostly one, to the best of our ability. Something definitive tracking species would likely be greatly appreciated by future generations.
