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Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage (phys.org)
Namarrgon writes: Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (position, size, and orientation) digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000ÂC and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190ÂC) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.
190AC! That's .... either very warm, or reasonly high voltage. Now if there were only a character set that could help us distinguish an A from a degree circle symbol
Glass is hundreds of times more scratch resistant than the extremely delicate magnetic media they install in hard drives (ok it really isn't, but the sensitivity is just as crazy because of the nano-meter tolerances required). Of course, this technology could be used in a protective case, like a hard drive, especially if the density/aging rates are as stated.
Are all these "Glass Discs" shaped like human skulls?
The Mayans might have some copyright issues with that ( Mayan copyright lifetime = Author death + 2 Mayan Apocalypses )
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Archiving suggests write-only, but this paper shows that the technology can be used for rewritable storage as well.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Dig site 12, artifact 2372: perfectly preserved glass discs. Assumed to be religious artifacts, associated with worship of the sun.
According to the paper, they wrote three layers deep at a 150nm pitch. At 3 bits per nanodot, the claimed 360TB could be stored in about one square inch. Compare that to the latest 10TB HDDs, which have an areal density of around 0.14 TB per square inch.
No figures are given for transfer speeds, though they describe 200kHz laser pulses, which would be about 75 kB/second - not so dramatic, but it is after all a lab prototype. There are numerous options for speeding this up in commercial products.
If the intention is to provide data for future civilisations, then presumably some "key" discs would be included, with information at various scales describing the technology, equipment, and encoding needed to read the next deeper scale. The larger scales could be inscribed in common human-readable languages, but any civilisation capable of imaging the deepest nanoscopic scales would have no problem decoding well-described binary formats as well.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You underestimate archaeologists.
Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.
The Long Now foundation has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.