809
Microsoft develops ultra durable glass plates that can store several TBs of data for 10000 years
(unlocked.microsoft.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
809 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
60123 readers
3248 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Project Silica’s goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change."
Very important note here.
That's Glass-R but fot a few bucks more you can get a Glass-RW
Just watch out for Glass-RAM, it doesn’t work in most drives.
Excuse me, I was looking to download more glass RAM. Is it free?
So it's great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I'm interested in if it was cheap enough.
What kind of files would you use so it could be read in 10 000 years?
XML/HTML
and for your next question: Wikipedia.
So what was my question?
All my porn
Wouldn't that be funny to be tasked with getting the data off a 10 000 year old piece of glass only for it to be dragon/car vore?
Researcher in 10000 years: "Woah! You thought those 'ancient greeks' were weird? Look at this shit!"
My media collection. I really only need like 50 years tops. At which point I'll be dead or to senile to enjoy it. Unless I can back up my own consciousness onto it. Then... That.
Interesting replies but I’m just wondering what file format to use.
Don’t we have troubles opening stuff from 4-5 os versions ago?
ascii + markdown for text if you're from the US
Yeah, but that is because people want to make money and so make their file formats difficult to understand on purpose.
Whatever creatures discover our mystical tablets will hopefully be far smarter than us, or they'll use the sum of human knowledge to tile their bathrooms.
You want me to store my consciousness in plain text?
base64
I don't have anything I can't open and I've got stuff from 20+ years ago. I don't even have to go out of my way to have applications that are compatible with it. If I did run across something I would just build a VM with whatever software I needed to open it. Just have to keep in mind what software you'll need and back that up as well.
True, but being very easy to make would hopefully keep costs down, allowing you to have multiple plates.
Also, this may not be for home use but companies that need to store data for years.
I could see applications for home use. Media backup comes to mind.
My great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson is really gonna love this 36K remaster of Shrek. I know I would
Your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great who?
All that time copying greats, no time deciding on WHO. My future progeny are doomed
Haha maybe they will. I was thinking more like family photos.
That's roughly 1,500 years of descendants. Well past even Futurama's time!
"Bob, why the hell did you format this as 'Jim sux dicks'?! You know that's permanent, right?"
10K years later
Alien captain: Anything to report?
Alien: We need to find a being named "Jim", sir...
We've got lots of Roman dick drawings, so it's our turn to leave our mark on the future
Why so negative? It could just as well be humans that find such a thing 10K years later
Unlikely at the rate we're going. I'd give us 100 years, at most.
If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD's back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.
What's more important is the time and cost to read and write.
Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.
This.. well roughly. People here say muh file formats etc. But you're really going for the maximum lifetime, if its uncompressed text, it wouldn't be too hard to reverse engineer if future people figure out that there's data on there at all. The harder part may be extracting the data at all. We could also include instructions on how certain file formats can be read.
It's is is still a great long term archive storage, and more likely the data would be transfered to a better storage device within a few 100 years (if we're talking about archiving the present for future archologists that is)
How amazing would it be if we came across some tomb that was just filled with thousands of scrolls detailing the whole history of Rome and Greece and all those other empires from the BC years?
So its cd but fom the future
CDs aren't expected to last more than 100 years in storage.
This is more like stone tablets for the future.