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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.
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.
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"
"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.
Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again...
No left turn unstoned.
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.
They could never keep up their schedule of yearly security breaches for millions of years.
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 -----------------------------------
came to the conclusion that permanence doesn't exist in the world. [...] informed Western and Eastern thought to this very day
Yeah, no permanence there.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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
It's 3 spatial dimensions + Size and Orientation of the molecules, all of which they can measure. They could have avoided ambiguity by using "Degrees of Freedom" instead of "dimensions" but 5D is quite catchy.
Simple way to achieve this with conventional media. Destroy mankind!
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!!!!
etch it in stone, it worked for the Egyptians.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
A million years from now lawyers for SCO will claim the quartz crystal contains their precious proprietary code from Unix and demand a 700 credit per seat license from the archaologists plus their signature on a non-disclosure agreement.