“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”
…but only one million years into it’s life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.
prints article out
places it on an overflowing, ancient pile of documents of promising, science proved data storage methods that haven’t made it to public use yet
All of this is useless because they can’t be used to replace an ssd
I’m pretty sure I still hear of people using tapes for extremely long term but not often accessed storage. This sounds, just from the title, like it could be useful for that.
How hf can you have 5D space within 3D space? This sounds like marketing bullshit.
The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess “birefringence,” meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.
That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel’s location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.
Oh, I get it now. It’s a five-dimensional mathematical space which is given by the three physical space dimensions plus the difference in light orientation and the difference the light strength.
It’s not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.
Er… that’s what it sounds like, anyway…
5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.
It is the correct term if you look at it from a Hilbert space point of view. You have 5 probe options (vector 5D) that give you 5 read options (vector 5D).
Finally some worthy storage for memes!
Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.
Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.
You mean various levels of fucked up porn.
Not if I have anything to do with it
Oh good it can fit the next Call of Duty game.
Good luck finding a reading device for it in 100y, let alone 14 billion years. I doubt there will be a human civilization a few thousand years from now. :)
Remember how humanity had problems understanding the meaning of ancient egypt hyroglyphs from just a few thousand years back until The Rosetta stone was found and some really clever and dedicated guy put an awful lot of work into the translation? Good luck with JPG images or pdf documents or even ASCII text.
It’s OK to make fun of non-existing/ not yet market ready devices, no?
As long as as humans haven’t succumed to brainrot and still have capacity for math and logic, we can figure it out. It’s encoded, not encrypted.
The classic problem of long-term nuclear waste warning messages is about conveying information over cultural barriers. This is a concrete data type, not interpretation of vague contexual meanings from pictograms. Math and logic don’t change while cultures do. Images are far more retrievable than the meaning of an image.
Wait until humans find a way to divide by 0. Suddenly Cambrian explosion in science, immediate Warp civilization and whatnot.
Then they find this chip, but cannot decipher it, because they don’t understand mathematics not able to divide by 0 😅.
Images would likely be the easiest possible thing to translate compared to more arbitrary codes since in that situation the output should be more easily decodable?
Also, there’s plenty of easy solutions to that.
I thought it would be hard to reverse engineer the compression algorithms used in JPEG images. Or even understand what the data structure is supposed to be to begin with.
I agree. If easy accessibility for future archeologists was the goal one could maybe use 1 or more 2D matrices of scalar values to represent monochromatic images. Or just etch the pixels of the image itself in the medium - like we do with microfiche.
Why would you need to reverse engineer the compression algorithm? The output can be viewed without that. I don’t need to know how you got to my party to have a good time with you :)
IIRC the thing is, you first present the key to the structure in some simple form, and then the rest of the data can be more complex.
Like the question how one would tell a future generation to not go to a dangerous place? Like a nuclear waste dump. Slightly different topic, I know.
Communicating with someone whose language and mindset doesn’t exist yet could be tricky. But math could be possible.:)
We still have Ford-Ts that are alive and kicking so pretty sure in a 100 years some museum will still have a working reading device for this. If this ever comes to market. Also the claim is just to ensure businesses that their backups on this medium will still be 100% readable in a couple of decades, even when the medium hasn’t been stored properly. Unlike tape that has a good chance to rot after 5 years. If it lasts a billion years it surely will survive some damp forgotten basement room for a few decades.
Fair. I agree with your arguments.
But I tried to clarify that I’m making fun of a not yet market-ready product (many are just fantasies to collect investor money and there won’t be a product ever.) and its exaggerated claims by pointing out that the sun will have died by then and no one cares about your excel sheets anymore. And more practical limitations like missing software and devices to read and understand the contents in a much shorter time frame. I exaggerated back if you will. ;)
But is it safe from the cats? 😼
glass shattering sounds
Not even cats are safe from cats.
Is anything, really?
It’s amazing to see all the effort we all put in perfecting technology to long-term store our porn. 360TB? I’d like to order 2 please.
“We are a technology licensing company”
This is good news from the point of view of being able to create devices that can read these crystals; as a comment on the linked site says:
The realistic lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.
Tbh my own personal use case is getting buried with all of my data and become some kind of data-“Tollund man” in the year 4000, when they dig up my data cube and study it endlessly.
I expect them to build a reading device to do this; it’s the least I would expect if they want to study the holiday I was on in Bergen, or completely misunderstand the two hotdog pictures I happen to have as some kind of fellatio training device.
“Myes, we do believe family structures were loosely organised around the remote picture beaming devices that used to be called “te levision”
I’m thinking of it the same way, and not having the readers be trade secrets but published specs is good for future digital archeologists.
For example, Dyson uses trade secrets instead of parents, so it would be harder to recreate their tech in the future.
Excellent, I will catalog my journals of my metamorphosis into a giant worm on these.
Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific
“a 5-inch glass platter.” Found the weak point…
See, now this is the tech I would understand pouring billions into. Give every nation on earth a durable copy of the last 100 years of medicine, physics, biology. That’s what a reasonable ruling class ought to do.
At least give them to the nations which aren’t currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)
those are the places that most need it though
Eh, we earned it.
Once you have the tech fully worked out, the budget to make them is going to be cheaper. Easier for all nations to get their own
