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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.
We have achieved the inevitable in data storage, not by creating a media that will outlive its physical readers, but by creating a media whose content will outlive its human readers.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
IIRC orientation = phase
Perl Programmer for hire
We don't need to store data indefinitely, we just need to keep Slashdot up. Any lost information will be duplicated here eventually.
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?)
It's great that we can store data that will last for eons. Guess what: So did a lot of cultures that left us mountains of written text. Too bad nobody has the ability to read it anymore.
Storing data forever means nothing if the future recipients of that data cannot access it. And we're not even talking about some stone tablets that are at least easily readable if you know the language. You first of all have to find out THAT what you hold in your hands is actually data. Imagine I'm not familiar with our way of encoding data, what would I see in the disc the man holds in the picture in TFA? An image. And some other image above it. And I think in the middle there's some scratched square.
That's basically all there is to the "uninitiated".
No, folks. If you want to store data "forever", you first and foremost have to make sure that whoever digs it up also knows without a doubt that this IS data. Next you have to provide a way for him to decipher it. And THEN we can talk about the significance of producing data storage that can last until the end of the universe.
We already have had data storage that can outlive our civilization.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the look of it. it seems you can imprint visible text on it and pictures.
So you may make a rosetta stone of instructions on how to make a reader in as many languages you can think of. As well as pictures. I am not so much worried about a billion years but 10,000 years is a good run, where memory of our society would normally be close to gone. Finding such material on how to make a reader and to make one and get all our crazy data would be an major archaeological find. Perhaps after seeing it, they will realize that we share many of the same problems that our future has, while they may chuckle at some of the issues that we have now, which are so obviously wrong and stupid, but no one at our time realizes it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's considered cheating; but you can also ensure that the backups always outlast the users by 'retiring' any user whose backup media are starting to show signs of flakiness. The side benefit is the steep reduction in the number of people asking you to pull something from backups for them.
5D? What are the other two dimensions?
Flexibility and Grape.
#DeleteChrome
The blank media tax will be prohibitive.
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.
I keep hoping for journalism. Foolish, I know. From TFA:
...similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.
That's quality, that is.
It continues:
The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.
Thanks for that. Anybody who has been paying attention knew this wasn't just a dupe, but a two year old dupe. (We won't ask why we're talking about the size of a text file in kilobits.) Except, is it? Why are we talking about it again? Did the write speed go up? Did the theoretical longevity improve? Did the mome raths outgrabe? TFA doesn't say.
It gets worse. The effing press release doesn't say. And it is in fact the idiot source of the quote in the previous summary that managed to be mangled unicode:
...virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 degrees C )
The University of Southampton press office believes room temperature is 190 degrees C. A fine educational institution, no doubt. (And slashdot refuses to even display ASCII 248, let alone the unicode degree symbol.)
The whole things look like a botched effort on the part of the university to drum up some funding, especially since the press release ends with:
The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology.
Yeah, no kidding...
Best of all, at the current write throughput (not mentioned in this idiot press release), it would take approximately 1200 years to fill a single disc to capacity.
Why would you put it in just one place?
Copies everywhere!
Not bad. If the resulting crystals are small and light enough, perhaps part of every spacecraft and lander. All landers double as memorials of the human race up to that point.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Unless there's a catastrophe of some kind that turns our civilization into the ancient Egypt of the future, I'm pretty sure that civilization a billion years in the future will know it's data. They'll probably be able to read it (what WON'T they be able to do?). They just won't care about it.
Will anyone recognize it as different than a chunk of salt? Is the knowledge of the universe being wasted on dinner tables every day? Should we be reading every truckload coming out of the salt mine just in case?
I was thinking along the following lines ...
big x's mark about 20 or 30 spots on the moon.
you can see it with a real powerful telescope
that would have been invented around 1900
this is a frame of reference to technology to spot it
we know that they have to develop a huge roman candle to get to the moon
so we have to form some sort of lock that 1950's humans could open
when they get to the X
Now we have to design a language, What would 1950's human read ...
it's got to be binary or math or chemical symbols ( Water would be one of
them, using 3 orbs connected properly with size difference I am guessing )
so we get them in, find the door language, and basically a lot of instruction
books in large writing ( 5 point ) going smaller
we have given them everything, from the IC design to today, but they have to
design more powerful microscopes and stuff every time to see deeper and learn more
it's a huge instruction book set with lot's of redundancy
if you see me, smile and say hello.
There's a lot of discussion about some of these problems in the various agencies tasked with documenting nuclear waste sites. Perhaps most famously, the WIPP:
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Excerpts here)
It's a great read. One of the most critical determinations by the interdisciplinary team was that the most detailed information wasn't necessarily the most important or useful. You need multiple layers of messaging, when trying to convey something to people 10000 years from now who probably don't speak the same language. The most basic being: "There is a message here"
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Save part of the thing to print microscopic human-readable instructions a la Voyager 1.
We covered this in 2012 and 2013.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
tl;dr, this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered. The only format I know which this can be done is old fashioned tar... but even with that, there are blocksize issues, and there are also compression items as well (gzip, bzip2, xz, etc.) Something like a PDF/A standard... but for filesystems and data.
If only we had a Universal Disk Format
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
If data hasn't been accessed for over 100 years, is it really of any value, anyway? If nobody cares to hot-swap in new "limited lifetime" backup media into the RAID array as elements fail, then the value of data in the array is pretty suspect. Sure, it's cool to think you're writing indelible graffiti on the sidewalks of the universe for all who come after you to ponder, but of all the yottabytes of crap that we're generating today, how much of that will anybody really care enough about in the year 3015 to bother to scan it?
IIRC orientation = phase
Not exactly, but close. In birefringent crystals, there is a different index of refraction on each axis, Incident light in a specific direction to a section of birefringence will bend differently depending on the relative indices (because one axis will be slow and another will be fast)
These folks used a pulse laser to set a nanostructure located at an (x,y,z) in the crystal to one of 4 orientations for birefringence and one of 2 different light retardance yielding 3 bits of storage for each (x,y,z) location in the crystal (what they call 5D storage).
Their advance is that their technique uses a spatial light modulator (kind of like an LCD panel) to configure the 3 bits instead of traditional optics which would have required a mechanical apparatus (e.g., stepper+screw assembly on optics) and thus be bit serial and slow, although they still need to physically move the crystal to change what group of (x,y,z) locations to write.
The spatial light modulator was use to create a holographic (aka phase-like) image for some fancy optics (i.e., fresnel lens and a specially constructed half-wave plate matrix) to set the amplitude and the polarization of the light used to configure the nanostructure. But unlike a phase hologram, what they are actually configuring is the birefringence axes of that local structure (i.e., the local index of refraction relative to each axis of the crystal).
Why use birefringence instead of traditional phase recorded "holographic" memory storage? Because it's easier to write partial sectors, incident light from bits comes out at different angles (easier to build detectors), and you don't have to have expensive phase-controlled optics to illuminate the storage to read it out.
the king james fucking bible bullshit? really? ffs ....we should put a stop to this irrational bullshit being propagated....damn religious virus..../ rant