HBO
HBO premiered Fahrenheit 451 tonight, a dystopian book set in a future America where books are burned and free thought is pretty much illegal. The movie is getting mixed reviews, with a 32 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (and honestly, it’s much better than that.) It’s a good movie. It might not be as good as the book, but it’s certainly an enjoyable film. One of the many questions viewers have about the movie is exactly what is OMNIS (and what the word means in real life.) Is OMNIS portrayed the same way it is in the book? This post has spoilers for the movie.
In Latin, the word “omnis” translates to mean “every” or “all” or, more precisely, “all, every, the whole, of every kind.”
OMNIS is first revealed in the movie when a woman is found with a giant, illegal library. When they are about to burn her books, she chooses to set herself on fire and burn right with the books. This has a profound impact on Montag and, to a lesser extent, his mentor Beatty.
In the movie, OMNIS refers to a top secret project by a rebel group. The project involves encoding books into DNA so they can never truly be destroyed. We learn that the rebel group has already encoded a bird’s DNA with thousands of books, and they plan to encode many other species too. Before they get a chance, their hideout is raided. But the bird is set free and it meets with a flock of birds. As it mates, the information will spread.
The only thing that’s unclear about this is how people are then going to extract the books from the DNA later. They attached a tracker to the bird, so perhaps it was trained to migrate to where the scientists are.
It makes sense that this might be a great way to preserve the books from being burned and destroyed in this universe. The series takes place in the future, where technology has advanced beyond our own. And the idea is realistic enough. In 2012, the first book was encoded in DNA. It was a 53,000 word book with 11 JPG images and a computer program, encoded into strands of DNA. And they made 70 billion copies. As Time explained, theoretically four grams of DNA could hold every piece of data the entire world produces in a year.
To encode a book into DNA, scientists first took a computer file of the book and converted it into binary code. They then translated that code into DNA, with 1s standing for adenine or cytosine, and Os standing for guanine or thymine. In 2017, Science Magazine reported that as long as society can read and write DNA, they can decode DNA. It doesn’t degrade over time and doesn’t become obsolete. In fact, just last July, a Harvard team used CRISPR to encode a video into live bacteria, and demonstrated that those records could be passed on to their descendants. This marked the first time that digital information was stored onto a live organism and not artificial DNA. So theoretically, the OMNIS idea might work in a future time.
But does the concept of OMNIS even exist in the book? The answer is no. In the book, rebels had to memorize books to preserve literature. And they still did this in the movie too, but OMNIS was also added to the storyline.