Woah iGEM seems to be getting a lot of attention! This is good I think, synthetic biology is an important new field of engineering and science. In many ways I feel like the "old" AI days, the whole philosophy of "if you want to understand it, you'll have to build it" is very similar. Personally I was part of the University of Groningen team (www.igemgroningen.com) which aimed to create a hydrophobic (water repelling) biofilm coating, it could've had lots of applications if it worked but like most iGEM teams it wasn't all that successful. One of my primary objections to this project while watching the presentation is that you'll still have to sequence the genome ... a costly and time consuming activity, also the compression was a good thought but large sequences of nucleotides will inevitably start coding for RNA which could lead to a whole range of interference, unwanted proteins being the obvious one. Moreover you'll have entire colonies (millions of cells) with the same data, and little to no control between the individual differences. While I do believe in the future of organic systems as a means for data processing and storage I don't believe that treating them as digital circuits is the right way to go.

You have a sea full of methane. Why not take a methane fuel cell of some sorts with you and use the sea to fuel your communications apparatus. It's a long shot, sure, but it's the first time we don't actually need to worry about fuel in outer space.

In both the physical and conceptual sense it's a mesh(/web). Physically it interconnects computers via wires in a web. Conceptually it connects ideas and information by use of hyperlinks(links for short) in a mesh. Both the conceptual and physical network are open, everyone can post ideas and links to ideas furthermore everyone can add computers to the web. It is interesting to note that the conceptual and physical internet are two separate things. There is no law binding the ideas in the internet (stored in, for example, html documents) to specific computers in the mesh. Nor is there a law stating that specific machines in the web should contain specific information. In a way the conceptual internet is distributed over the physical network the same way the pictures in a photo album are independent from the album itself.