"As fans of The Mote in God's Eye already know, one remaining question must be answered for any data storage method expected to last for millennia—what happens when the technological and cultural context surrounding a storage medium collapses? Silica addresses this problem also, by using initial "ground truth" tracks. The team is using machine learning algorithms to re-read Silica's data, and in the event of the loss of those trained algorithms, fresh algorithms can train very rapidly on the "ground truth" tracks, which teach them how to interpret the rest of the data." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-s...