Data Saved in Quartz Glass Might Last 300M Years | Hacker News Reader

Data Saved in Quartz Glass Might Last 300M Years

scientificamerican.com

73 pointspmoriarty32 comments

"Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast ... CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s."

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong.

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif

Some people still keep their data drawn in the suede of the back seat of their car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_Familia

My interpretation is they intended to say something about "MP3 players" and failed.

Which is a shame, because the notion that flash memory's organization of semiconductor charges into bits is only temporary and will randomize itself over time, is sort of important to consumers. At the process sizes in modern flash memory, it was shocking to me to find out that all three of the others will last longer.

"The dots represent information in binary form, a standard that should be comprehensible even in the distant future"

Said by someone who never had to import Word files into OpenOffice.

True ultra long term storage with decent storage capacity could prefix each and every binary files with an ASCII text file detailing the file structure on the binary in enough detail that a competent programmer could write a parser.

If you were still worried about that, all binary files could be duplicated in ASCII (minus formatting etc.)

And where does the information about the ASCII format go?

You could start with uncompressed bitmaps for images, and the pictures can explain all the necessary information. Like they do with the golden records on the voyager probes.

I don't think the information stored should be compressed. Or if it is, it should be very simple compression, like a huffman encoding. That way it wouldn't just look like random data. There would be patterns in it, and statistical analyses could reveal lots of information.

Assuming you store the text in English, you also need to teach that language..

Not necessarily. But you could easily add a few images with English descriptions next to them. That would be enough linguists to decipher the rest.

Just include a dictionary that is word-complete - i.e. does not contain any word or symbol that it doesn't also define.

All dictionaries are circular. Though it would be possible to learn the relationships between words, and perhaps decipher it that way.

Actually, not all dictionaries are circular - some are more definition-complete than others, and it does make a difference.

I mean circular, in that the definition's reference each other. E.g. if the definition for "happy" was "not sad" and the definition for "sad" was "not happy. If you didn't know one of those words already, the dictionary would be useless.

Easy.

Any civilization advanced enough to read microscopic encoded data would be advanced enough to do basic statistical analysis on ASCII encoded English/whatever and work out what it is. The harder part is figuring out how to understand English.

An example of this being done recently is MIT students decoding the ancient language Ugaritic

http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630

300M years is a very long time. Unless there is some continuity in the use of the stored information, in a way it's documented, translated and reinterpreted, there is no hope something alive 300M years from now, something that will not be remotely human, will be able to understand it any more than we understand the songs sponges sing each other.

It apparently has a data density similar to blu-ray. A better source: http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html

At quoted "1.5 GB/inch^2" they are comparing their 100 layer medium against a single-layer 25GB bluray disc. At three~four layers, current bluray discs offer 100~128GB of capacity.

Archival Disc spec brings optical media to 300GB now, 1TB on roadmap.[0] This leaves current Quartz Glass an order of magnitude behind current optical media.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc

*fairly updated source

Article was 2012, the press release was 2014

Even if the data saved in Quartz Glass last 300M years, 300M years later, how can they figure out what all these binary digit mean, without knowing the format of the data.

For something lasting so far into the future, some clues must be left to help someone in the future to extract the information from the media.

Maybe this would be a good medium for http://cosmicos.github.io/

It looks like The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta disc needs to step up its game. It's only designed to last a couple of millennia.

This article is from 2012.

This would be a good solution assuming you only needed to write once to your archive. Since this is literally etched in glass, there's no way to edit any data. Also, instructions on what to do with a box of glass someone finds 100 years from now would be helpful. :P

The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long.

I don't see how that is relevant. The world could end tomorrow. Do we just abandon long term data backup?

IMO that's even more of a reason for this. If the world continues normally, then old hard drives and CDs can just be copied onto new ones over and over again. If something ever happens, then everything will be lost. With this, we could preserve a huge amount of the world's knowledge forever.

However I see what they are trying to say. 300M years is a lot, when even 100 years would be great compared to current storage systems. And on that time scale, the rate of bit rot is less important than other factors.

Schroedinger's Aperiodic Crystal, taken literally.

I'm glad AOL floppy disks didn't last 300 million years.

Superman's crystals, the ones that have encoded in them the full 3D HD movie of his parents and the fate of Krypton. I knew science would eventually catch up to sci fi :)

Quartz is not glass. Quartz is a crystal.

Quartz glass refers to fused quartz, which is a glass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fused_quartz

You are indeed correct. This article uses quartz and quartz glass interchangeably, so I assumed the author was making the sapphire/"sapphire glass" error (because sapphire is never a glass) but upon checking out the original article, you are right, they are working on fused silica.

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