Technology @lemmy.zip BrikoX @lemmy.zip 2 mo. ago

Indestructible quartz crystal can store 360TB of data for billions of years

www.techspot.com Indestructible quartz crystal can store 360TB of data for billions of years

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK successfully stored the entirety of the human genome sequence onto an indestructible 5D optical memory crystal no bigger...

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK successfully stored the entirety of the human genome sequence onto an indestructible 5D optical memory crystal no bigger than a penny. The indestructibility claims are no joke since the discs can withstand temperatures up to 1,000°C, cosmic radiation, and even direct impact forces of 10 tons per cm2.

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111 comments

These marketing types shouldn’t be allowed to call anything ‘indestructible’ until they’ve given it to my kid to play with for a week.
The '5D' in the name comes from the fact that, unlike 2D markings on a piece of paper or tape, this method uses two optical dimensions and three spatial coordinates to write throughout the material.

Went to the article seeking answers but got only more questions.
Digitize all national history, literature, and culture. Put them on a hundred of these and distribute them all over the world. Refresh every 6 mos. Keep one on a server that all the kids can access.

Next time there's war or whatever intolerant culture comes into power, and loots the museums, stops culture, or blows up statues, at least you've kept the history alive.

Think of it as the Library of Alexandria in horcrux form.

P.S. Important to include a user's guide, reference schematics for the reader, and FAQs, etched into something semi-permanent alongside all the copies.
5 billion years from now some archeologist reconstructing the data found on a usb stick floating in the asteroid belt only to (gleefully) find out it was a porn stash they found.

Now we ofc all know this amazing find under its famous name 'Rosetta Bone pizza delivery service'.
This is how we make the magic orbs a reality
Only headache is assuming whoever found it could read it, and parse it.

Requires microscopy and a compute model of the right standard, right?

Like to actually parse the bits...

Sure super aliens could but could post apocalyptic humans in a few centuries, who have regained enough stability to care about such things?
Just enough space for a install of Windows and one AAA title game.
Nice. We need something like this. Digital archiving is still best done on magnetic tape as disk and flash drives all fail after a few decades. But even for regular users, it'd be nice to keep a digital copy of family photos that lasts forever.
Well on our way to the God Emperor's stolen journals now
1: "Please, destroy my datacrystal when I die. Like a true friend." 2: "But dude...it's indestructible..." 3: "I will destroy the crystal! I will take it to mount doom!" 2: "...And my axe."
Wow, Kryptonians were really ahead of the curve.
If all of this came true at an affordable consumer price, I think I would build a new computer just to use it
They say “billions of years” but that sounds like just the sort of thing a stray cosmic ray would ruin.

Maybe they’re planning on using a checksum for error correction like they do with RAID.
Plastic is also indestructible and look where it got us
I hate it when you buy a hard drive rated for eight billion years and it craps out on you after just four and a half.
Cardassisn optolythic data rod.
“Indestructible” ok.
Yeah, great can I buy it? No? Okay another 10 years then.
Fits fine in the "three body problem" novel.

More on the serious side of this news, I can't imagine the speed of writing or reading, but shouldn't be very fast, or am I wrong?
can i get this for my phone?
You keep using that word..
Human genome would be a handful of gigabytes, depending the file format, compression and so on... But it can hardly fill 1 of those 360 TiB.

Indestructible? Yeah, sure...

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