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I have a question for anyone here who understands how this works: is the glass from the article resilient to physical shocks like falling/shaking/heat/other mec

I have a question for anyone here who understands how this works: is the glass from the article resilient to physical shocks like falling/shaking/heat/other mechanical stress? Documents that are meant to last a long time used to be written on vellum because it is a very physically durable material. I understand that this glass method beats existing digital storage methods for resilience, but does it best traditional analog/legacy techniques?

kragen 7y ago
Yes, fused quartz has roughly the mechanical durability of granite, and it doesn't melt until a considerably higher temperature than ordinary glass (though lower than the 1650° temperature at which crystalline quartz melts). Vellum and other leathers have a lifespan of under 10000 years under ideal conditions, like those under which Ötzi was preserved. Under such conditions, the researchers extrapolate from accelerated-aging measurements that their medium will last 3×10²⁰ years, which is 3×10¹⁴ times as long. That is, this glass disc will last 300,000,000,000,000 times as long as a vellum document will, unless it's subjected to high heat. They also extrapolate that at 462 K (189°, or, in obsolete units, 372°F) it will last the current age of the universe, some 10–100 billion years. At 189° I think vellum's lifetime is a few minutes.
- SoylentOrange 7y ago
  Thanks for the answer. Can the durability of the fused quartz be compared to the durability of this storage format though? (from a more detailed article [1]) > The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures. Is the idea that these nanostructures are themselves hyper-resilient? Or would a significant impact alter them so as to render them unreadable? [1]: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-u...
  - kragen 7y ago
    Well, there are a couple of different questions here. One is about resilience to physical shocks such as falling and mechanical stress, which could destroy the disc but won't do anything to the nanogratings. The other is about gradual, continuous decay processes — over a sufficiently long period of time, random thermal fluctuations will destroy any solid object, and analogous but larger-scale relaxation processes will destroy galaxies as well. Such processes could cause the nanogratings to decay long before the fused quartz itself evaporates. The nanogratings do have a certain amount of built-in redundancy; they're holographic phenomena.

kragen 7y ago

Yes, fused quartz has roughly the mechanical durability of granite, and it doesn't melt until a considerably higher temperature than ordinary glass (though lower than the 1650° temperature at which crystalline quartz melts). Vellum and other leathers have a lifespan of under 10000 years under ideal conditions, like those under which Ötzi was preserved. Under such conditions, the researchers extrapolate from accelerated-aging measurements that their medium will last 3×10²⁰ years, which is 3×10¹⁴ times as long. That is, this glass disc will last 300,000,000,000,000 times as long as a vellum document will, unless it's subjected to high heat. They also extrapolate that at 462 K (189°, or, in obsolete units, 372°F) it will last the current age of the universe, some 10–100 billion years. At 189° I think vellum's lifetime is a few minutes.

SoylentOrange 7y ago
Thanks for the answer. Can the durability of the fused quartz be compared to the durability of this storage format though? (from a more detailed article [1]) > The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures. Is the idea that these nanostructures are themselves hyper-resilient? Or would a significant impact alter them so as to render them unreadable? [1]: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-u...
- kragen 7y ago
  Well, there are a couple of different questions here. One is about resilience to physical shocks such as falling and mechanical stress, which could destroy the disc but won't do anything to the nanogratings. The other is about gradual, continuous decay processes — over a sufficiently long period of time, random thermal fluctuations will destroy any solid object, and analogous but larger-scale relaxation processes will destroy galaxies as well. Such processes could cause the nanogratings to decay long before the fused quartz itself evaporates. The nanogratings do have a certain amount of built-in redundancy; they're holographic phenomena.