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Data Storage That Could Outlast the Human Race
Nerval's Lobster writes "Just in case you haven't been keeping up with the latest in five-dimensional digital data storage using femtocell-laser inscription, here's an update: it works. A team of researchers at the University of Southampton have demonstrated a way to record and retrieve as much as 360 terabytes of digital data onto a single disk of quartz glass in a way that can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 C and should keep the data stable and readable for up to a million years. 'It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race,' said Peter Kazansky, professor of physical optoelectronics at the Univ. of Southampton's Optical Research Centre. 'This technology can secure the last evidence of civilization: all we've learnt will not be forgotten.' Leaving aside the question of how many Twitter posts and Facebook updates really need to be preserved longer than the human species, the technology appears to have tremendous potential for low-cost, long-term, high-volume archiving of enormous databanks. The quartz-glass technique relies on lasers pulsing one quadrillion times per second though a modulator that splits each pulse into 256 beams, generating a holographic image that is recorded on self-assembled nanostructures within a disk of fused-quartz glass. The data are stored in a five-dimensional matrix—the size and directional orientation of each nanostructured dot becomes dimensions four and five, in addition to the usual X, Y and Z axes that describe physical location. Files are written in three layers of dots, separated by five micrometers within a disk of quartz glass nicknamed 'Superman memory crystal' by researchers. (Hitachi has also been researching something similar.)"
Or rather completely irrelevant. Nothing to see here except a few people that want attention. The issue with long-term storage is _not_ how to preserve the bits. It is how to preserve Reading equipment and, even more difficult, software that can read the data stored and transform it into something the user can read.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When you can't read the specs of the 5-dimension layer in your cave with axe and fire...
They could also deeply engrave rocks and stone tablets and for really important messages mountains and other large surfaces.
Worked pretty well for the ancients.
Every warning about not having the specific non-obvious [and in its time, patented + proprietary] tech to read the media comes into play here.
A naked and petrified Natalie Portman would surely outlast the human race - or maybe Mae Ling Mak if Natalie isn't available. Simply cover her in hot grits, and engrave the entire wisdom of humanity onto her boobs. That way alien visitors from the future will be sure to notice.
THIS is what our research funding needs to be spent on, not some "1000C quartz disc" crap.
Dropbox?
Guess which of the 3-letter-agencies will spend some budget for the tech?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
more money from its members, after they already forked out their life savings to pay for those stainless steel plates of his "scripture" Sci-Fi drivel inside those titanium vaults...
Archeologists find one of these pieces of quartz, and then (through a lifetime's study) work out that they are not just pretty baubles, but are actually data storage devices. The excitement builds. Whole teams of researchers devote their life to the task of decoding the message - after all, the Rosetta Stone gave a lot of incite into the ancients - and then finally, the day comes when someone has worked it all out:
99 crystals contain cat pictures
1 of them contains the instructions on how to build the reader
And, tucked into one small segment of one of the crystals, almost as an afterthought, the digitised Bodlean Library, and the Library of Congress. Pity that bit was a bit chipped...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
... not like the future "beings" of this planet are going to be able to figure out how to read the damn thing - we've all see planet of the apes and how inferior those beings were.. good use to document everything if it is just a hologram on a piece of rock..
Imagine if such a thing would be on Mars, left there by some ancient civilization. Now all we have to do is find it. Should be easy, right?
Now we only need kickstarter to put all known port to couple of these babies
"It has not been discovered what these disc-shaped glass objects were intended to symbolize, but it is now believed that they served either as ceremonial ornaments or a crude form of currency."
So I don't know about this latest and greatest storage tech but I have a few ideas of my own...Rock. Rock can last a long time. Of course chiseling information into rock is not really a viable option for gigabyte scale information storage, let alone the petabytes required...
I propose storing the data in whatever medium is most likely to be preserved & the instructions on how to read the media be chiseled into rock. Those same instructions could be used to decompress a small subset of information to give further instructions on how to create a device that can read the rest of the data.
I suggest rock because it's cheap and durable...of course there are other, more durable materials out there...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
So they not only confirmed the extra dimensions string theory predicts, but even managed to store data in them?
Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again...
No left turn unstoned.
This will be great: intelligent squirrels will be treated to yottabytes of Slashdot flame wars and images of grumpy cat. And they'll conclude that our civilization was inevitably doomed.
Now we just need to build a license server that will operate for a million years, so the DRM-encrypted data will still be readable.
We had enough trouble deciphering pictures of glyphs from ancient civilisation. This is a fancy data storage medium but you have no chance in ever deciphering it in the future.
The quartz-glass technique relies on lasers pulsing one quadrillion times per second though a modulator that splits each pulse into 256 beams, generating a holographic image that is recorded on self-assembled nanostructures within a disk of fused-quartz glass. The data are stored in a five-dimensional matrix—the size and directional orientation of each nanostructured dot becomes dimensions four and five, in addition to the usual X, Y and Z axes that describe physical location. Files are written in three layers of dots, separated by five micrometers within a disk of quartz glass nicknamed 'Superman memory crystal' by researchers
So the obvious question is where and how do we store this user manual? The only storage medium I know of that will last that long is a disc of quartz glass.
Does this disk withstand a drop or any other mechanical stress?
How can "someone" coming after the human race has vanished read that disk?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The data are stored in a five-dimensional matrix - the size and directional orientation becomes dimensions four and five, in addition to the usual X, Y and Z
So my cock travels in the 4th dimension when I watch pr0n?
I'm not interested in a million years.
I keep seeing warnings that the backup DVDs I burn are only good for a few years and need periodic re-copying.
I just want storage that'll last longer than I do.
Apparently if you chip out a small square of quartz from the top edge, you can flip the disk over and store another 360 Terrabytes on the other side. The manaufacturers don't want you knowing this, of course, as they want to sell 720 TB stroage at a premium price.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...is called "arithmetic coding":
Here you go
We thought we were pretty cool putting a gold plated disc on voyager. Maybe peppering the universe with crystals embedded in rock would be a better way of spreading the word... better start looking inside those meteorites!
I used to imagine us leaving an SSD with all human info for future people to discover. Then it occurred to me that they might not have the means to see what's in the drives in the first place. Well, back to carving on stone.
That are the real questions.
Read speed?
Write speed?
Could this be used as a hard disc, or is it more like a CDR?
how does that work with only 3 spacial dimensions ?
A team of researchers at the University of Southampton have demonstrated a way to record and retrieve as much as 360 terabytes of digital data onto a single disk of quartz glass
Unfortunately that single disc is 150ft wide.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Have they tried putting a crystal rock from the ground in the reader to see if someone or something has done this before ? ;-) ( mostly )
now we just need a laser that will last (be functional) for a million years -AND- a repair manual that ...
will last just as long and all will be good in the land of english speaking data storages
is this technology like the "crystals" in superman?
A millions years from now, the first new sentient evolutionary forms that discover the fallen towers of we the ancient gods will proudly hold these precious disks up to the light. Holograms dense with data will dance within the crystalline structures before their eyes. In their grasp will be the records of our progress -- all our science and forewarnings of its power, high definition videos of escapades among the stars, and the description of a state machine to decode it. They will have in their possession an invaluable source for goodness guiding a maddening leap from their understanding to ours that they may forge a society greater still than our own...
And they'll make down right amazing discoveries day after day in necklace design from each and every one.
Source: The Rosetta Project
-kgj
I'd hate for some future sentient species to find these discs and an intact reader but not have the proper subscription keys to authorize decoding.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
the only supported filesystem will be resierFS... when Reiser get's out of jail in about million years :)
Simple way to achieve this with conventional media. Destroy mankind!
... of the NSA collectively creaming their pants?
One drunken night full of pictures I can't escape from!
A stupid argument. If the method of storage and its retreival are documented, both can be replicated. The current 'problem' is that institutions balk at the cost of replicating the reader technology of yesteryear. It is straightforward and COSTLY to reconstruct say the tape readers NASA used in the sixties ... and that's _all_ it is. The problem is really whether the storage medium has deteriorated making the data irretrievable even with the appropriate reader.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This technology is great, but at that density it's practically useless for preserving human knowledge beyond our race. We can be fairly certain that beings in our universe will be able to sense some form of electromagnetic radiation (as star light seems to be a common energy source), they will likely have at least two such receptors to achieve depth perception of our universe's three macro scale physical dimensions. I have used interference patterns myself to create mediums capable of conveying four dimensional knowledge directly to any such beings instantaneously -- when I was a teenager, hell they even have cheap starter kits now.
Using simple techniques available to even basement holographers one can create integral holograms AKA 4D holograms AKA multiplexed holographic movies that animate as the viewing angle changes. More precise setups can encode more movie (requiring slowly turning) or even multiple images with more integration. That is to say we've been making holographic videos for a few decades. So, when we got macro scale 4D holographic representations in the material it's big news... Increasing the density isn't actually revolutionary for long term storage.
The advantage of the 4D hologram over 3D holograms or 2D images is that it can encode motion directly reproduced without requiring any mechanism but itself a viewer and light. 4D means we can convey causality in our depictions, and thus much more easily describe the process for understanding a denser data store... It's a lot more compact and intuitive than a flip-book, or film reel, for example. Hey, I turn this crystal and the dude in there points between the fire and the silly "FIRE" symbols, Oh! That's their word for it.
Devising a way to utilize something as stable as these crystals in place of holographic film one could create other such holographic videos depicting activities and literally teaching our symbolic languages and descriptions of manufacturing processes that would survive a million years. It is these even more durable LOW density optical representations that can provide a doorway into our culture from beyond itself. Once those who discover and learn the analog to our teachings we could encode in the simpler 4D holograms would be capable of understanding the technique required to play back the dense 5D data-structures in TFA. The Aliens Won't Need To Decode The TFA's Disks to really know who or what we are, they'll already have learned that.
We'll have had to encode instructions for simpler systems such as sound playback to encode our speech and eventual understanding about wave propagation via sound vibration, possibly even 3D ultrasonic tactile feedback generators to convey other more complex ideas, long before they could decode these 5D data disks. Yes, even if you assume a super-intelligent race, they would come to understand who we were and what we thought about energy and other such things from the simpler low resolution storage prior to obtaining the data in TFA's disks. We wouldn't risk NOT giving them such things in case our data encoding remained an enigma.
What remains for you to encode in 5HD other than the much more trivial rambling of our race? Don't get me wrong: Music, books, movies, video games, etc. would be a wealth of knowledge about us to anthropologists of an alien race... However, all the important stuff that any of their equivalent of layperson would know would be the important bits from a lower density data storage.
Furthermore. If you encode some data on one of these disks, and launch it into space, the data on the voyager disks will have remained in storage still longer. If there's an event to destroy the data from the golden disks we've sent, then it would likely also defunct a crystal. Rise in temperature is rarely, if ever, part of an isolated event.
Think about it. What good would 5HD data do you without a machi
Actually they're replaying the whole set of crystals ... it's what we call 'existence'.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
... DRM prevents them being read on other planets.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Bjizzled in stone, Yo!.
After millions of years it will be deep in some sedimentary or igneous layers thousands of feet down and the cockroaches don't have the technology to dig down that far, or even care, Yo!
I'm 36 and I feel old. This sounds like the fancy stuff Gyro Gearloose talks
when he's presenting one of his steam driven high-tech machines to a customer.
I'd still be inclined to call this 2.5D or 3D at a stretch. Use of the terminology 'dimension' usually implies the ability to make use of that dimension an arbitrary amount. So X & Y can be as big as you can make the surface. That is your 2 true dimensions.
The Z, in this case, is only '3 layers'. Maybe in the future that can be an arbitrary size, but for now it's just 3 layers. Not really a full 'dimension'. Once they can go arbitrarily large in Z, then you can call it 3D.
As for 4 & 5 (size and orientation), there can only be a certain number of sizes and orientations that each bit could represent. Really this is just changing the storage from Base 2 (Or Base 10 to be /. pedantic) to Base N where N = number of orientations * number of sizes. Certainly a good idea, but it should, in my opinion, not be called a dimension. We could have really big values of N, but then it would be more analogous to analogue storage. I guess you could consider it as a dimension at that point, possibly, maybe.
Bah it's all just marketing anyway, right?
I will make one with dot colour as a factor. SIX DEE STORAGE!!!!
How exactly would some future civilization read a laser encoded crystal?? I've got enough problems trying to watch my dad's old super-8 movies recordings (and I've got the projector). Will a future civilization of geckos or crows really understand the concept of an inode or the Reiser FS let alone trying to physically read the device? The best legacy is huge stone monuments or pictures carved in granite (marble is too soft) as in ancient Egypt.
So at the rate we are destroying our ability to survive on this planet, that would be what, like 50 years?
Hmm. Does this guy have plans to bomb/poison the human race out of existence, or is he just superconfident it'll happen by itself? Perhaps more importantly, if the human race is gone, who is the intended audience of the document?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
"Hitachi has also been researching something similar."
Well THAT one will probably fail in 2 years or less, given Hitachi's typical quality level.
A short story by Arthur C Clarke , when the Venusians get here a few millenia after the demise of humanity, they find a flat cylinder containing a series of images which when moved rapidly past a light source reveals a 2d animation. They try to understand it, but they cannot fathom the last image which reads
A Walt Disney Production.
Domesday
How do you store the instructions for using this thing?
... not like the future "beings" of this planet are going to be able to figure out how to read the damn thing - we've all see planet of the apes and how inferior those beings were.. good use to document everything if it is just a hologram on a piece of rock..
They'll probably just use the damn things to encode their own histories and over-write ours!
...
Hang on a second...
What did the first historical document say?
Hello, World!
Embed the data in cockroach genes. That ensures they will last as long as this planet supports insect life.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Can you read that 30 year old CD? That floppy? Even if you still have equipment? Nope, they're impermanent. How's that 150 year old photograph looking? Pretty degraded, isn't it.
Even books, unless printed on acid-free paper, only last decades. If a fire hits then the books, CDs, floppies, are all gone.
These withstand temps to 1000 C. Your average building fire doesn't get that hot. Unless these things are fragile they'll be practically indestructable. It's the year 2340 and you can still read Doctorow (but Pratchett's stuff will be gone, thanks to eternal copyrights).
So you can't read those eight inch floppies any more? Even if you had a drive the floppy itself would be unreadable. You didn't transfer the data to 5 inch then three inch then CD then DVD? That's your own fault. When these "forever" disks become obsolete, just transfer the data.
The fact that the data will still be readable in a million years means you finally have a reliable backup solution.
Plus, the huge size of the dataset this is capable of storing is astounding.
And you guys are all "so what?" I swear, I can't understand how a site about science and engineering and programming can have so many people with such little imaginations. Of course, I can't figure out why people who don't know the difference between they're and their and there come here, either.
That i don't understand half of an article but am still completely blown away. Well done smart research people, well done.
should keep the data stable and readable for up to a million years - I wonder how did they test that?
There is no laser in the world that gets anywhere near close to pulsing 1 quadrillion = 10^15 times per second. That's just silly. But, femtosecond pulse length lasers (i.e. 10^-15 seconds wide) are common lab devices. They tend to pulse between 10^1-10^7 times per second. So, the summary is only off by a factor of 10^8... but I can understand his confusion.
I'll bet that this research was sponsored by the NSA.
The voyager spacecraft had a record with a bunch of cool data. Now that it's left the solar system and in interstellar space its got a big head start on any data storage medium that will outlive the human race. Hell if you think of it, the universe itself is a storage medium, and the radio waves from our bygone eras are out there too. You would have to destroy the universe to get rid of that record.
Greed is the root of all evil.
10,000 years from now, aliens excavating in Utah will be able to see what you posted on Facebook
yesterday .
So the aliens who find this planet in 5 million years can see all of our porn?
Ewww yech! On the other hand, humans appear to have only three distinct genders: Those that want to have sex with Megan Fox, those that want to be Megan Fox, and those that want to do her hair.
Have gnu, will travel.
I estimate I need 2 Zetabytes of storage for my porn. Can these folks build a a bigger disk?
If you think humans cannot create a disaster involving temperatures beyond 1000 C, then you are underestimating (overestimating?) yourselves.
We are not the first intelligent civilization on earth....the more intelligent species left. Fortunately they left a clue in the pyramids unfortunately a group of idiots now claims to have built them.....they just can't explain how! Someday a group of frogs will claim to have designed these crystals and they will be Holy symbols with great healing power!
Excellent! Now we can back up everything and send it to Mars for safekeeping!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
to read the crystal skulls we already have. They probably contain the accumulated tweets of the ancient aliens.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain