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Synthetic Stone DVD Claimed To Last 1,000 Years
Lucas123 writes "A start-up launched a new DVD archive product this week: a disc that it says will hold its data for 1,000 years. The company, Cranberry, says its DiamonDisc product, which can be used in any standard DVD player, is not subject to deterioration from heat, UV rays or material rot due to humidity or other elements because it has no dyes, adhesives or reflective materials like standard DVD discs, and its discs are made from a vastly more durable synthetic stone. Data is laid down on the platter much in the same way as a standard DVD disc, but with DiamonDisc the burner etches much deeper pits. Cranberry said it is also working on producing a Blu-ray version of its 1,000-year disc."
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time. Then these stone DVD's will last a long time in the landfill.
It does raise some fun things to speculate about though.
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
Will they suffer from data overload?
What will future archaeologists, with PhD's, think when they read what you, personally, wrote in a forum? Now that's scary.
That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.
Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell, after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.
That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)
ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)
Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table books were produced.
Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design, and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.
Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!