
The special data device SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy sent to orbit is just the start - john58
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/09/the-special-data-device-spacexs-falcon-heavy-sent-to-orbit-is-just-the-start/
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j0e1
I was intrigued recently reading a relevant blog post by Stephen Wolfram that
made me think a lot more about this topic. Here is the link for those
interested:

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-
un...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-universe-
beacons-for-the-afterlife-of-our-civilization/)

And its discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269500)

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hawktheslayer
The most fascinating part of all this for me is the way Musk thinks "past the
sale". He, and others, are thinking about things like how the interplanetary
internet would work while we are all still bound to earth. I want to do more
of this type of thinking that focuses not on _if_ but _when_.

~~~
debt
"I want to do more of this type of thinking that focuses not on if but when."

It involves shipping a lot of bugs so brace yourself.

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Theodores
Here is how it works:

[https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-
storage-u...](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-
update.page)

So it is really a variation on the 'Bubblegram' 3D laser printing in glass:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram)

The '5D' comes from the size and the orientation of the bits that get fused
together deep in the glass.

The original 3D printing in glass came out of Russia, so it is interesting
that this '5D' science is kind of Russian.

I think that with 3D laser printing in glass there was always a problem of
'what use is this?' and I am wondering if that quest resulted in the Asimov
ideas and the pitch to SpaceX etc.

I do not think that it is at all obvious that 'size' and 'orientation' matter
to our binary trained brains, so making a machine capable of reading the disc
and then reading it and then getting the schema right is a bit of an ask.

The HotWheels toy car with Spaceman is the merch they need to be selling to
get donations for this.

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leonroy
This is one piece of the puzzle certainly if man is going to look beyond
Earth. If a Mars colony for instance was indeed established there would be
some interesting data transfer and communication problems to work out in order
to effectively transfer information and knowledge:

Mars at its closest is 58 million km (36 million miles) away from Earth. It
varies though and can be as far as 100 million km (63 million miles).

That's about 192 seconds to 333 seconds of latency which an electromagnetic
signal would have to traverse each way.

I can't dig up what the maximum permissable latency of a TCP based network is
but I'd imagine 5 minutes exceeds it. Even if you created a network in which a
5 minute latency is acceptable your throughput would be ridiculously low.

There would likely have to be proxies and relays along the way to ensure
acceptable performance but in itself the problem would require a lot of
resources to effectively solve. I wonder if SpaceX is actively looking at
offworld comms or if they hope organizations like Arch will attempt to solve
it. Either way, an exciting time to be an engineer!

~~~
greenhouse_gas
> It varies though and can be as far as 100 million km (63 million miles).

It could get worse. Since at that point, the Sun is smack in between the earth
and mars, so for a few days you can't get _any_ signal through.

You'd have to bounce it off some third satellite in solar orbit (like a
triangle).

See
[https://space.stackexchange.com/a/18972](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/18972)

~~~
pzxc
It's even worse than that. The earth is 93 million miles from the sun (1 AU),
so when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun it's at least 180 million
miles away, with the sun in the way.

The numbers expressed by GP for how far Earth is from Mars is actually
referring to how far Earth's _orbit_ is from Mars' _orbit_ , not the distance
of the planets themselves at various positions in their orbits.

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cohomologo
From the ARCH foundation FAQ:

Beyond the laser based digital layer there may also be layers that require the
ability to detect and decode molecular, atomic scale or subatomic scale
(quantum or holographic) information. We can already encode data in this way,
but reading it requires very advanced technology.

They seem so clueless that even if I bought into the underlying mission of
preserving data by sending it into space, I wouldn't trust this group to do
it.

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Slansitartop
It would be really cool if you could order disks like this, but with your own
data. Especially if they directly encoded images that could be read with a
microscope.

~~~
outworlder
There are many use cases for reliable, long-term storage. This is why some
places still use microfilms. This could be a product by itself, and finance
the whole enterprise.

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grkvlt
What on earth are '5D optical storage techniques' when they're at home?

~~~
grkvlt
So, from the Southampton link below:

> The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and
> orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these
> nanostructures.

I still think this is a bit disingenuous, it is a three-dimensional encoding.
Would people consider a colour photograph as encoding four dimensional
information when its pixels are represented as _(x, y, brightness, colour)_
for example? How many dimensions does writing have?

~~~
jerf
"Would people consider a colour photograph as encoding four dimensional
information when its pixels are represented as (x, y, brightness, colour) for
example?"

Actually, yes, they do. Computer vision people will envision a photograph as
containing the number of dimensions equal to the number of independent numbers
used to describe it, so a 1000x1000 RGB image would be considered
3,000,000-dimensional. This is perfectly routine in that world.

Writing would be considered n-dimensional.
[http://www.mathwords.com/n/n_dimensions.htm](http://www.mathwords.com/n/n_dimensions.htm)
In non-math terms you'd probably be justified in saying the question is ill-
defined, as what constitutes an orthogonal vector component in a piece of
writing is not something that has an universally-obvious answer. But it's not
that there are 0 possibilities, it is that there is very many.

In a nutshell, the word "dimension" does _not_ simply describe 3-dimensional
space, and all other uses are somehow wrong. Dimension applies to _any_
independent element of a vector, and using it to describe spacetime is a tiny,
tiny subset of the valid uses of the term. Another very common example is that
describing the movement of a free floating in space rigid body is a _twelve_
dimensional value; you need to describe x, y, and z (or equivalant), you need
to describe the _rotation_ around x, y, and z, and then you need to describe
the velocity of each of those components. That's 12 dimensions. In fact, it's
12 dreadfully mundane dimensions.

Incidentally, _not_ included in valid uses of the term is the sci-fi sense of
the term; "parallel dimension" is an oxymoron as it expands to "parallel
perpendicular measurement", and "alternate dimension", especially with the
idea that it is somehow "like" ours but just slightly different, is just a
common scifi trope that is gibberish in real terms. I'd say that if one's
concept of dimension isn't, as I said, "dreadfully mundane", it's not set up
correctly. It's really a boring term; all the ways in which sci-fi makes it
sound exciting or mysterious are not part of the real term.

If you'd like to recover some of the sense of wonder associated with the term,
I'd recommend learning about what it means to have a fractional dimension, in
real mathematics:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4)

~~~
Maybestring
>Writing would be considered n-dimensional.

It would also be reasonable to model writing as infinite dimensional, since
there is no maximum length string.

------
JackFr
The first three Foundation books are good. Then Asimov went off the rails.

~~~
Animats
All of the good Asimov books are in his first 100.

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comnetxr
Why would any society that had lost all access to Asimovs foundation trilogy
retain the knowledge to read one of these disks?

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deusofnull
i wonder what the I/O speed of those crystal drives are...

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hughes
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a roadster full of data storage crystals
hurtling down the highway.

~~~
jlgaddis
As long as you don't need reliable delivery!

