Slashdot Mirror
Data Written With "Superman Memory Crystal" Could Last Billions of Years (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Researchers have demonstrated a method of femtosecond laser writing in self-assembled crystaline nanostructures that can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degree Celsius and last indefinitely at room temperature. The storage method enables up to 360TB of capacity on a single disc. Data is written to a file comprised of three layers of nano-structured dots separated by five micrometres. The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing. Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. Coined as the 'Superman memory crystal', as the glass memory has been compared to the "memory crystals" used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz.
Goddamn, I don't think I've seen so many buzzwords in a single summary in my life!
Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), ..., Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race.
So long as they called the directory: Documents we humans chose to ignore.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From TFA: Researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered a way to store data in five dimensions on nanostructure glass...
No, they certainly did not.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Unless something I'm not thinking of forbids this, I'd imagine that having the ability to produce durable structures small enough to be useful for bulk data storage would also allow you to build larger structures that are visible to the naked eye or under various levels of magnification, at the expense of data density.
This doesn't solve the rather nasty tech-writer challenge of trying to compose an instruction manual for a reader-of-the-language-in-use-2000-years-from-now; but it would allow you to provide multiple 'stages' of readable data with various trade-offs between storage capacity and intelligibility. Text large enough to be obvious and readable with the naked eye would be inefficient; but hard to miss. Text large enough to require modest magnification to actually read; but look patterned enough to be worth investigating to the naked eye could easily crunch several paragraphs into a reasonably modest space(microfilm/microfiche scale, say). Text invisible to the naked eye; but readable without any fancy polarization tricks and just an optical microscope could be denser still; and finally the technique described could be used for bulk data storage.
Doesn't solve the language barrier; but it would allow you to do some amount of self-documenting of the format, starting with a visible 'README', and proceeding down through one or more layers of less densely packed data describing how to interpret the more densely packed layer beneath, and finally the data area.(which we would presumably encrypt and tie to a DRM system that was nuked to ashes millenia ago; because what's a good technological advance without some self defeating stupidity?)
I cleaned all that crap out years and years ago. Why? Because all of them were flaky, slow, and were much improved upon by later technology. Now you have a tech that can store 360TB in a single small package that will never go bad? Just imagine! Get the entire filmography for everything you want to own and never have to buy a replacement because of media deteriorating in 1 form or another, nor your kids, or kids kids, and so on. Hmm, I'll bet the *AAs won't allow any content on those.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
No culture has ever left us a "mountain" of text that we aren't able to at least partially decipher, unless we're talking a writing system measured in words/kilogram.
You're so clueless about this matter, it's almost shocking.
Leibniz would have recognized a digital archive of Wikipedia (say the size of the English Wikipedia, but in any human language) as a linguistic record at the drop of pin (I grant him a few weeks to crack UTF-8.) Every conceivable statistical measure would point to this. Perhaps a sentient dolphin—if our wildest theories about the nature of the dolphin mind play out—would have trouble dialing this in without the use of a calculating machine. One doesn't need to understand a single word in order to extract the semantic graph. From there, deep learning would practically spew out coloured buckets like a rainbow farting unicorn.
You don't think with hundreds of thousands of pages where the bold subject is immediately followed by "(1646-1716)" that this wouldn't quickly be recognized as ordered pairs of positive integers? With a bell curve on the interval distribution? And a sudden flat top at 2016? But only if you ignore the ones containing BC or BCE, which thin out tremendously the further back you go?
I wonder, could this axis be a physical dimension, or perhaps the infamous fourth dimension? We are talking a cognitive mode which has discovered planetary motion, are we not?
If you don't think any of that, well then, you have such a spectacularly low opinion of human or human-successor intelligence, I don't even think we can communicate.
Until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, ancient Egypt did *exactly* that, and they didn't have the 'advantage' of using a medium where the 'writing' is invisible to the human eye. To recognize a linguistic record, you've got to be able to recognize a) that the object *is* a data storage medium (e.g. SD card), b) figure out how to extract the data from the storage medium (e.g. card reader), c) determine the encoding used (e.g. UTF-8), d) convert that into a set of discrete symbols you can operate on (e.g. glyphs), and *then* you've got to determine what type of data it is.
To move from a to b, you've got to have hardware that is *capable* of reading the storage medium, that can interface with your current systems.
That's a tricky enough job today with 10" floppies, because a) the hardware to read them is rare (even rarer if you want it functional), b) the hardware interfaces to communicate with them are virtually non-existant on modern systems, c) the file system format of the data on those disks is often unknown, and d) the file formats on those file systems are unknown and/or undocumented.
Your whole 'this is easy' mind-set is built on the presumption that the people who are looking at the storage medium will be able to recognize it as something with writing on it. That was easy with engraved stone tablets, because we could physically *see* the writing. If I give you a stack of unlabeled micro-SD cards, and ask you to tell me which ones contain text, you're not going to be able to do it without *also* having the hardware and software necessary to read those micro-SD cards.