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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.
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.
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 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
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.
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,
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.