Studying bacteria: The long-term plan

For the 500-year experiment to succeed, scientists are supposed to test the dried bacteria for viability and DNA damage every other year for the first 24 years and then every quarter-century for the next 475.

The team left a USB stick with instructions as well as a hard copy on paper. As neither is foolproof, the team asks that researchers will at each 25-year point copy the instructions, so they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.