
'Five-dimensional' glass discs could store data for billions of years - aethertap
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/five-dimensional-5d-glass-discs-data-storage-southampton-a6879176.html
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zeotroph
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-
gi...](https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2013/10/141415/a-mega-to-giga-year-
storage-medium-can-outlive-the-human-race) (not peer reviewed?)

~~~
pronoiac
As I read it: 1. size 2. orientation 3-5. the usual dimensions.

Reading it as "five measurements" might be clearer.

~~~
amelius
Orientation is at least 2 dimensions (see e.g. spherical coordinates).

~~~
carlob
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
Hence I said "at least" :)

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YeGoblynQueenne
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.

~~~
wpietri
It's a good question. Short answer: bootstrapping.

I happened to be over at the Long Now foundation on Thursday when this fellow
stopped by for a chat; the Long Now wants to evaluate this storage technique
for their language archive, the Rosetta Disk.

The Long Now's solution is to have information at multiple scales:

[http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/](http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/)

Note that there is human-readable text around the rim that gets rapidly
smaller. That's a clue that you need to keep zooming in. A prototype container
is part magnifying glass, and I think the plan is to have instructions at
modest resolutions on how to build a 100x microscope, and then more
instructions at that scale on how to build what you need to get to the next
scale.

Presumably for this nanoscale disc you would apply the principle repeatedly.
Each scale contains instructions for getting to the next scale. For the finest
scales you'd need a lot of social and technological infrastructure. But
there's another Long Now project to get people to think about what that
requires:

[http://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-
civilization-...](http://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-
begins/)

~~~
fit2rule
>social and technological infrastructure

The question I am yet to find a good answer for, with regards to the Long Now
proposal, is this: why?

Like, if you know you're going to have a situation where this immensely
important information is going to have to be re-discovered, some distant time
into the future, because .. after all, entropy is the natural state of things
and who could expect we'll still speak English/C++ 100,000 short years from
now .. so we'll teach them again, some day way in the future. But, why? Is it
merely to fight the entropy, and say: no matter the light, here is the shadow
we cast today, and millions of days, millions of years into the future?

Because that is some mighty high pretense.

However, perhaps you have a better answer, as a more coherent observer of the
Long Now technological/social infrastructure? Is it really just to challenge
time in a technological sense, or .. perhaps .. is this one area where
secularism is becoming what it resists, and indeed such foundations are a new
religion/cult/etc.?

~~~
wpietri
Sorry, I'm not following. Why what? The Long Now Foundation itself? The
Rosetta disk in particular? Some other project of theirs?

You can see what the founders say in their own words here:
[http://longnow.org/about/](http://longnow.org/about/)

But their basic goal as I see it is: "encourag[ing] the long view and the
taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in
centuries".

The disk itself is an example of that. The name obviously hearkens back to the
Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics for
us:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone)

With a copy of the Rosetta Disk, as long as some future finder understands any
one language spoken today they'll be able to translate any other materials
they find from our era.

Will it survive? Will it be useful? Will it even be necessary? More broadly,
what does the future mean to us, and what effect do we want to have on it?

Those are all good questions. And my take is that the real purpose of the Long
Now is not to answer them, but to get people asking them. So good work, your
post helps fulfill the mission.

~~~
fit2rule
That is a great answer, thanks. :)

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bigbugbag
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.

~~~
iamphilrae
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
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 ...

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hughw
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
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.

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krylon
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
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
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.

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amelius
How well does it withstand cosmic radiation?

~~~
tamana
Put it in a vault.

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rbanffy
Remember inPhase holographic storage.

