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Hitachi Creates Quartz Glass Archival Medium
guttentag writes "Hitachi has announced (original press release in Japanese, translated to English) a new storage medium that uses a laser to imprint dots on a piece of quartz glass that correspond to binary code. The dots can be read with an optical microscope and appropriate software. The company says this medium is resistant to extreme heat, radiation, radio waves and should still be readable after a few hundred million years. It's intended as an archival format with data density similar to a music CD (40MB per square inch with 4 layers)."
Finally, a long term solution so that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids can see my baby pictures, listen to my Fallout Boy CDs, and watch my disturbing pr0n collection. I'll order a dozen!
sudo make me a sandwich
Dear Hitachi,
please record the video "Never Gonna Give You Up", so that all future generations are able to get rick-rolled. And label the disc "soft porn" to ensure they'll work at decoding the data.
The problem with long term data archival isn't just the storage medium -- it's being able to recreate the reader mechanism from scratch. Tomorrow world war 3 happens. We're bombed back to the stone age. Thousands of years from now, humanity has returned to the level it is today, but with no knowledge or intact examples of previous technology. How do you explain how to build something, when the language, the words, and the understanding of physics and technology are all different (and possibly wrong or incomplete)?
We've been trying for a long time to come up with a universal language; Partly in case we ever contact E.T., but also because of the problem of language fragmentation. Human language tends to diverge, not converge. How do you manage to tell someone how to construct a complex device from scratch, without any linguistic foundation and scientific understanding to build from?
Civilization in a bottle: Not as easy as it sounds.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Scientist 1 : Look! We found these crystals with dots on it. We believe they're some ancient data storage discs.
Scientist 2 : Cool! What do they say?
Scientist 1 : We don't know, we need the software to decode them.
Scientist 2 : And where is the software?
Scientist 1 : We're pretty sure it's on one of the discs...
(Scientist 1 : Also, we need a running DRM server, whatever that may be)
100 million years, right?
' That means I can use this to store my music collection until I finally have time to categorize and playlist it.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Thousand years from now, someone looking at computer data storage devices might be completely oblivious to what they were meant for.
"Ah, those crazy ancient people, obsessed with making ornamental plastic/metal boxes!"
I would say from an archeological perspective, any digital archive that requires a computer to read is a big no-no. Stone tablets are good, as even in the worst dark ages people will understand their purpose (even if they can't decipher the text). However stone tablets are limited in data density, so you can't write much on them.
I propose writing on titanium or aluminum sheets. Most of the writing would be in tiny microscopic font to get some decent data density -- like microfilm of the 80's, but with better long-term durability.
On the first page we could put normal-size writing as sort of a primer. Then the text would get progressively smaller until it's microfilm-sized, so the reader would get the point that the rest of the tablet is in tiny letters. We could put a diagram explaining the properties of a magnifying glass, and how to make one.
IBM 5100, futar-proof.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When can I use these crystals to send my baby to another world where he will have super powers and build a fortress of solitude when thrown into the ocean?
Link
-kgj
Great, now I have to buy my music all over again.
if we put them on metal someone will come along and melt them down and make a cooking pot or frying pan out of them. never under estimate the the ability of anyone to not give a crap about history and knowledge. what you need is a Indiana Jones like temple/datacenter/library that will kill anyone not very determined to get at what the ancients left behind built in a geographically stable area that will anything sort of a direct extinction level meteor strike. fill it with books to teach them basic english and then books to teach computer design and programming and the function/use of all of the equipment contained inside give them the language specifications for every programing language used, along with all of source code for the compliers as a reference. fill it to the brim with as much as you can to communicate how to use your acrival media
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Yeah, although more expensive, synthetic sapphire might be better
Are you sure you're a real archeologist?
Any interesting artifact these days is obsessed over to an incredible degree. It gets x-rayed, carbon dated, chemically analyzed, stuck in a MRI machine, looked at with a microscope, and the debates about the conclusions that can be drawn from those things last for decades.