7 ms·

'Five-dimensional' glass discs could store data for billions of years

40 points by aethertap 11y ago

amelius 11y ago
How well does it withstand cosmic radiation?
- tamana 11y ago
  Put it in a vault.
zeotroph 11y ago
On the '5D' claim: "The information encoding inside the disc is realised in five dimensions - the size and orientation of the nanostructures, in additional to their three-dimensional positions inside the disc." Those nanostructures are generated by a laser which alters the polarization of the material. Is that even five dimensional? Polarization is one more, but can each point in space contribute to an arbitrary (or even just large) number of different polarization? I do not see where the fifth might come from. The billion year claim does not seem to be validated, unlike similar research which used tungsten and silicon carbide[1], i.e. two different materials. The million/billion year durability was verified by substituting long periods of time with higher temperatures, i.e. heating the storage medium, and then checking the error rate. [1]: https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf / https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-giga-year-storage-medium-can-outlive-the-human-race https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-gi... (not peer reviewed?)
- pronoiac 11y ago
  As I read it: 1. size 2. orientation 3-5. the usual dimensions. Reading it as "five measurements" might be clearer.
  - amelius 11y ago
    Orientation is at least 2 dimensions (see e.g. spherical coordinates).
    - yorwba 11y ago
      In the image of the data being read it looks like the laser only hits the structures from one direction. I think the "orientation" parameter is actually the polarization angle for the ray, so only one dimension.
      - amelius 11y ago
        Could be true, but then those spatial dimensions should probably be 2 instead of 3 (laser coming from one direction means you lose that direction).
    - carlob 11y ago
      Orientation of a vector is 2 dimensions (spherical coordinates), orientation of a 3D object is 3 dimensions (Euler angles). It all boils down to the fact that you can rotate the vector using itself as its axis and it stays the same, but you can't do that with, say, a cube.
      - amelius 11y ago
        Hence I said "at least" :)
  - Abraln 11y ago
    Yeah, it's a bit sensationalist. By that logic you could argue that writing on a piece of paper is 4-D: horizontal and vertical position, what letter/symbol is there, and color. You could add font and underlines/italics to encode even more data per symbol if you wanted.
    - keyboardwarrior 11y ago
      Well yea because a dimension is infinitely divisiable. so a dimension can hold infinite dimensions within it. like i.e numbers.
krylon 11y ago
It sounds nice. But I have been fooled before. During my training I found a paper on IBM joining some company to create a "HD-ROM", using gallium ions instead of a Laser, which supposedly would have stored some 150 GB on a medium the size of a CD or DVD, and that mediumd could been literally anything, rock, iron, a diamond, whatever, ... but apparently, it never came to pass.
- burkaman 11y ago
  I think it did sort of come to pass. http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta http://rosettaproject.org/disk/technology/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/technology/ But it just wasn't very popular? Hard to tell.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Hi! Occasional Long Now volunteer here. I've seen the prototype disks, but my hazy recollection is that production cost kept this from being a practical technology for many uses, which of course keeps the production cost high. It turns out most people don't really care about archival quality. E.g., almost all my data is on media that I replace a couple times a decade.
YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
I guess the real problem with all such storage media is that, OK, you may encode your message in a certain way- but how do you know that anyone who comes across it will be able to read it? How do you figure out that you need to look at nanosctructures inside a chunk of glass (or whatever) and that there's a message in there stored in a certain encoding? As a way to preserve technological and scientific knowledge in particular, it's a bit pointless. You need to already possess the technology and the science to a) discover the message and b) decipher it.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  I am sure that there's been a lot of research into that particular problem, but I would also challenge the basic assumption you seem to be making, that science would advance exactly as it did last time. Take our plane, rocket and nuclear technology, would it be as advanced relative to other sciences if WW2/the cold war hadn't have happened? If a lot of money and manpower hadn't been ploughed into it relative to other sciences for 30 years? Also this preservation technology is now available to us going forward, say a catastrophic collapse happened 200 years from now and 2000 years from now they get the technology to decode these things, they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
    >> I would also challenge the basic assumption you seem to be making, that science would advance exactly as it did last time. I think I'm worried that science will _not_ advance exactly as it did last time. Right now we have two things: a) the technology to create the physical medium of the message and b) the technology to encode it in a way that is efficient in terms of its storage. Who's to say that future generations will have both (a) and (b) at the time they come across the message? If they don't, then either they will not recognise it for what it is, or they will not be able to read it, or both. >> they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find. Even if there's no collapse, I assume the future will like to know a few things about the past, but of course we can't know. Maybe the future is a boot stepping on a human face, forever and such things as history are not allowed. That would be a development entirely unrelated to technological means, but that would defeat any planning based on assumptions about future technologies. And unfortunately we can't really do much about it except, I don't know- form secret societies for the preservation of knowledge? Like in Nightfall [1]? :/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_story_and_novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_stor...
bigbugbag 11y ago
Oh crap! Those holographic storage cartridges I've been expecting for a a dozen years have been obsoleted by a new storage tech that will never come to market either. Hopefully ibm will soon start to market their 3D write with lasers in gel like substance that will replace hard drives in ten years as they announced circa 2002-2003 . Maybe not, and this new media release is no different than the others breakthrough storage tech we hear on a regular basis but are never turned into a reality. What good would a media that last billions of years when 50 years later there is not a device able to read those discs ? If a proprietary format then it will lack the documentation to be able to build a device to read the disc and interface with the computers of 2060. If an open format and standard then how to keep the specs along with the discs as storing it on the discs would defeat its purpose. Hopefully some investors will burn some money in this tech that will never come to light for consumers and will not keep up to its overhyped claims.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  At least there is proven technology today [1] that lets you archive for about a thousand years. Store all your stuff to that, (and, of course, the cloud) - and then when one of these holographic storage systems with good traction comes online, dupe your stuff to that. [1] http://www.mdisc.com/mdisc-technology/ http://www.mdisc.com/mdisc-technology/
- iamphilrae 11y ago
  There's actually already a medium that can last hundreds, if not thousands of years which could contain the spec for this device. Let me see if I can drum up a link for it. Ah, here we go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    I've seen those used for all the things I could use a glass disc for. None of these things are of any use if the user can't read, or hasn't sustained itself, biologically, for whatever its digestion period is ...
rbanffy 11y ago
Remember inPhase holographic storage.
dosaygo 11y ago
Two boxes full of these discs, each box being the size of a box of LP records, could hold the DNA of every human on Earth. Humanity's Plan B. "That's why plan A, is a lot more fun."
hughw 11y ago
Several commenters here protest that the information might not be readable by any devices 50 years from now. But the application of the tech isn't a new media player. It's preserving the literature of our civilization across potential dark ages. If future civilizations discover these media, they'll easily discern that they contain encoded information, and crack the code. Imagine we were able to recover indestructible, encoded books from the library of Alexandria. Cryptographers would soon discover the code. The intent isn't to illuminate the dark ages when it might be impossible to decode the texts. The intent is to preserve for a time beyond the dark ages, when knowledge and culture return.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I think it's more likely a hypothetical dark age would see them as interesting jewellery, and drill holes in them so they could be worn as necklaces. Technology has an historical event horizon. If an item is on the wrong side of it, it's literally incomprehensible. Items like these are only useful to a culture that has already reached a similar technological level, give or take some small time delta. That makes them a very bad way indeed to preserve information about science and technology.

40 points by aethertap 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

How well does it withstand cosmic radiation?

tamana 11y ago
Put it in a vault.

zeotroph 11y ago

On the '5D' claim: "The information encoding inside the disc is realised in five dimensions - the size and orientation of the nanostructures, in additional to their three-dimensional positions inside the disc." Those nanostructures are generated by a laser which alters the polarization of the material. Is that even five dimensional? Polarization is one more, but can each point in space contribute to an arbitrary (or even just large) number of different polarization? I do not see where the fifth might come from. The billion year claim does not seem to be validated, unlike similar research which used tungsten and silicon carbide[1], i.e. two different materials. The million/billion year durability was verified by substituting long periods of time with higher temperatures, i.e. heating the storage medium, and then checking the error rate. [1]: https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf https://doc.utwente.nl/74827/1/Vries2010MME.pdf / https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-giga-year-storage-medium-can-outlive-the-human-race https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-gi... (not peer reviewed?)

pronoiac 11y ago
As I read it: 1. size 2. orientation 3-5. the usual dimensions. Reading it as "five measurements" might be clearer.
- amelius 11y ago
  Orientation is at least 2 dimensions (see e.g. spherical coordinates).
  - yorwba 11y ago
    In the image of the data being read it looks like the laser only hits the structures from one direction. I think the "orientation" parameter is actually the polarization angle for the ray, so only one dimension.
    - amelius 11y ago
      Could be true, but then those spatial dimensions should probably be 2 instead of 3 (laser coming from one direction means you lose that direction).
  - carlob 11y ago
    Orientation of a vector is 2 dimensions (spherical coordinates), orientation of a 3D object is 3 dimensions (Euler angles). It all boils down to the fact that you can rotate the vector using itself as its axis and it stays the same, but you can't do that with, say, a cube.
    - amelius 11y ago
      Hence I said "at least" :)
- Abraln 11y ago
  Yeah, it's a bit sensationalist. By that logic you could argue that writing on a piece of paper is 4-D: horizontal and vertical position, what letter/symbol is there, and color. You could add font and underlines/italics to encode even more data per symbol if you wanted.
  - keyboardwarrior 11y ago
    Well yea because a dimension is infinitely divisiable. so a dimension can hold infinite dimensions within it. like i.e numbers.

krylon 11y ago

It sounds nice. But I have been fooled before. During my training I found a paper on IBM joining some company to create a "HD-ROM", using gallium ions instead of a Laser, which supposedly would have stored some 150 GB on a medium the size of a CD or DVD, and that mediumd could been literally anything, rock, iron, a diamond, whatever, ... but apparently, it never came to pass.

burkaman 11y ago
I think it did sort of come to pass. http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta http://rosettaproject.org/disk/technology/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/technology/ But it just wasn't very popular? Hard to tell.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Hi! Occasional Long Now volunteer here. I've seen the prototype disks, but my hazy recollection is that production cost kept this from being a practical technology for many uses, which of course keeps the production cost high. It turns out most people don't really care about archival quality. E.g., almost all my data is on media that I replace a couple times a decade.

YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago

I guess the real problem with all such storage media is that, OK, you may encode your message in a certain way- but how do you know that anyone who comes across it will be able to read it? How do you figure out that you need to look at nanosctructures inside a chunk of glass (or whatever) and that there's a message in there stored in a certain encoding? As a way to preserve technological and scientific knowledge in particular, it's a bit pointless. You need to already possess the technology and the science to a) discover the message and b) decipher it.

mattmanser 11y ago
I am sure that there's been a lot of research into that particular problem, but I would also challenge the basic assumption you seem to be making, that science would advance exactly as it did last time. Take our plane, rocket and nuclear technology, would it be as advanced relative to other sciences if WW2/the cold war hadn't have happened? If a lot of money and manpower hadn't been ploughed into it relative to other sciences for 30 years? Also this preservation technology is now available to us going forward, say a catastrophic collapse happened 200 years from now and 2000 years from now they get the technology to decode these things, they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
  >> I would also challenge the basic assumption you seem to be making, that science would advance exactly as it did last time. I think I'm worried that science will _not_ advance exactly as it did last time. Right now we have two things: a) the technology to create the physical medium of the message and b) the technology to encode it in a way that is efficient in terms of its storage. Who's to say that future generations will have both (a) and (b) at the time they come across the message? If they don't, then either they will not recognise it for what it is, or they will not be able to read it, or both. >> they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find. Even if there's no collapse, I assume the future will like to know a few things about the past, but of course we can't know. Maybe the future is a boot stepping on a human face, forever and such things as history are not allowed. That would be a development entirely unrelated to technological means, but that would defeat any planning based on assumptions about future technologies. And unfortunately we can't really do much about it except, I don't know- form secret societies for the preservation of knowledge? Like in Nightfall [1]? :/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_story_and_novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_stor...

bigbugbag 11y ago

Oh crap! Those holographic storage cartridges I've been expecting for a a dozen years have been obsoleted by a new storage tech that will never come to market either. Hopefully ibm will soon start to market their 3D write with lasers in gel like substance that will replace hard drives in ten years as they announced circa 2002-2003 . Maybe not, and this new media release is no different than the others breakthrough storage tech we hear on a regular basis but are never turned into a reality. What good would a media that last billions of years when 50 years later there is not a device able to read those discs ? If a proprietary format then it will lack the documentation to be able to build a device to read the disc and interface with the computers of 2060. If an open format and standard then how to keep the specs along with the discs as storing it on the discs would defeat its purpose. Hopefully some investors will burn some money in this tech that will never come to light for consumers and will not keep up to its overhyped claims.

ghshephard 11y ago
At least there is proven technology today [1] that lets you archive for about a thousand years. Store all your stuff to that, (and, of course, the cloud) - and then when one of these holographic storage systems with good traction comes online, dupe your stuff to that. [1] http://www.mdisc.com/mdisc-technology/ http://www.mdisc.com/mdisc-technology/
iamphilrae 11y ago
There's actually already a medium that can last hundreds, if not thousands of years which could contain the spec for this device. Let me see if I can drum up a link for it. Ah, here we go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
- fit2rule 11y ago
  I've seen those used for all the things I could use a glass disc for. None of these things are of any use if the user can't read, or hasn't sustained itself, biologically, for whatever its digestion period is ...

rbanffy 11y ago

Remember inPhase holographic storage.

dosaygo 11y ago

Two boxes full of these discs, each box being the size of a box of LP records, could hold the DNA of every human on Earth. Humanity's Plan B. "That's why plan A, is a lot more fun."

hughw 11y ago

Several commenters here protest that the information might not be readable by any devices 50 years from now. But the application of the tech isn't a new media player. It's preserving the literature of our civilization across potential dark ages. If future civilizations discover these media, they'll easily discern that they contain encoded information, and crack the code. Imagine we were able to recover indestructible, encoded books from the library of Alexandria. Cryptographers would soon discover the code. The intent isn't to illuminate the dark ages when it might be impossible to decode the texts. The intent is to preserve for a time beyond the dark ages, when knowledge and culture return.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I think it's more likely a hypothetical dark age would see them as interesting jewellery, and drill holes in them so they could be worn as necklaces. Technology has an historical event horizon. If an item is on the wrong side of it, it's literally incomprehensible. Items like these are only useful to a culture that has already reached a similar technological level, give or take some small time delta. That makes them a very bad way indeed to preserve information about science and technology.