
Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass - hongzi
https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project-silica-superman/
======
HorizonXP
One of the startup ideas I've had is to modernize death.

Most humans want to "live forever." Given that we can't do that, we resort to
procreation, and leaving behind some pieces of ourselves to be remembered by,
with lots of cultures having some type of funeral practice to ensure this
occurs (i.e. tombstones).

With the proliferation of our digital lives, many of us have more photos,
videos, and other media than we know what to do with. Furthermore, we probably
don't have a great way to preserve this information.

Imagine a funeral service that could comb through your digital life, archive
it all, and keep it accessible to your family for generations. Bonus points
for summarizing it into a beautiful montage to be played to your family at
your service.

Financially, it would work a lot like how funeral homes operate with deposits,
insurance, and annuities, but the marginal cost should be much lower due to it
being a digital vs. physical product.

One of the problems I've been mulling over is the fact that digital storage
isn't perpetual, which means that someone has to ensure the data is maintained
in some way.

Therefore, something like the quartz glass storage medium in the article would
be perfect. Your data would be accessible via traditional means for 10-20
years after your death. Afterwards, it would still be accessible, but it would
be on cold storage, so it wouldn't be instantaneous. It would mean you'd
"never really die" since any of your descendants would be able to see what
your life was like.

I think that would be enough of a "hard problem to solve" to build a startup
around. Of course, you could extend it to preserve other forms of data, like
your DNA, or your mind like Westworld, where your descendants could
communicate with you whenever you wanted.

It could easily become one of the first perpetual corporations.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I want a life-sized hologram deep-fake, coded with all of that stuff. People
could come and ask questions or chat. It would take what they said and try to
either recall or synthesize what my response might be. I would not want it
online, insisting instead that people make a special trip to interact with my
digital remains.

~~~
dwoozle
Have you seen the “Black Museum” episode of Black Mirror?

~~~
mrec
The earliest appearance of this idea I can remember is the Dixie Flatline [1]
construct in _Neuromancer_ (1984), but I'm sure there are examples preceding
that.

[1]
[https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Dixie_Flatline](https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Dixie_Flatline)

------
hirundo
In the movie Kryptonian interactive holographic media is stored on irregular
crystal shards. It's disappointing that this quartz media instead just look
like squares of clear glass. I bet they're not even bothering to store them in
a super cool Fortress of Solitude somewhere deep in the arctic wilderness.

~~~
ptah
the arctic is melting so not safe to store it there

~~~
klyrs
Maybe Superman needs to learn how to chill.

------
kickscondor
They mention in the article that some of the old black-and-white Superman film
is stored on glass as well - but what really amuses me is that (if I recall
correctly) Superman HIMSELF stores film on glass (or long crystal shards) in
the 1978 film that is the subject of this article. My sister and I used to
pretend in winter that icicles were our VHS tapes and we’d put them in the
snow to “watch” them.

~~~
Teknoman117
I think they said the old glass recordings were radio serials, not movies.

~~~
kickscondor
Ah ok - thanks!

------
Animats
There's been "M-Disc" [1] for a decade or so.[1] It's a form of DVD/Blu-Ray
disc that, instead of using a dye that reacts to laser light, uses a drive
with a more powerful laser to blast an indentation into the recording
material. This is supposed to last a thousand years, and is much more
resistant to heat and water than dye-based discs.

The blanks cost about twice as much and you need a drive with the M-Disc
feature, which is not expensive.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

------
d--b
> The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an
> oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental
> threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures
> if things go wrong

How about dropping it on the floor?

~~~
52-6F-62
That was my first question, too.

I linked another company doing the same thing and they claimed it could
withstand 0.5 tons of force before breaking. I’m not sure how that applies to
dropping it, necessarily if there are other parameters that would cause a
weakness that way.

~~~
code_duck
The key there is what type of force. Glass is very strong against compression,
but not strong against tension.

------
skykooler
> Microsoft senior optical scientist James Clegg loads a piece of glass into a
> system that uses optics and artificial intelligence to retrieve and read
> data stored on glass.

How are they using "artificial intelligence" for this?

~~~
tantalor
"machine learning algorithms decode the patterns created when polarized light
shines through the glass"

Unclear why ML is required versus old-school methods.

~~~
dobleboble
"As fans of The Mote in God's Eye already know, one remaining question must be
answered for any data storage method expected to last for millennia—what
happens when the technological and cultural context surrounding a storage
medium collapses? Silica addresses this problem also, by using initial "ground
truth" tracks. The team is using machine learning algorithms to re-read
Silica's data, and in the event of the loss of those trained algorithms, fresh
algorithms can train very rapidly on the "ground truth" tracks, which teach
them how to interpret the rest of the data."
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-
project-s...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-
silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/)

~~~
dflock
You just need to get your civilisation back the point where you can write ML
algorithms first.

~~~
red75prime
Are our brains so inferior? Wouldn't someone who studies those ground-truth
records long enough learn to see the data?

~~~
dflock
Yes, they would - and it actually says that in the article. But you'd then
need some non-ml way to read & play it back, which would still require readily
available computers & lasers, etc...

------
userbinator
_The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an
oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental
threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if
things go wrong._

The worst environmental threat is when your media is a proprietary format with
secret specifications or even worse, DRM... even if the media could last
1000000 years, that's a moot point if the specifications have disappeared
before then, or the encryption keys lost. Given the tie-ins with the
entertainment industry mentioned in this article, the possibility of DRM
causing the death of a format is too big to ignore.

------
w-m
One of the figure captions says they are storing 75.6 GB on one of these
sheets. But I couldn't find any data on how long it takes to read and write,
other than it's slow. Does it take minutes, hours, days, weeks?

And I guess at least the reading can be somewhat parallelized to speed up?

~~~
ben_w
One week to write, 3 days to read:
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-
project-s...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-
silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/)

~~~
acqq
So why are they so happy when there's already 100 GB M-DISC which is much
faster?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

~~~
mey
Can't find much info on M-DISC, but [https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-
media/m-disc/](https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/) has it
as hundreds of years. Silca is claiming a thousand years.

------
johnohara
Hopefully someone at Universal Music Group reads this story and reaches out.
I'm not being sarcastic either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire)

~~~
52-6F-62
Agreed. That was a tragedy.

------
nayuki
The article seems to talk about the same concept as a
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram)
.

I like write-once optical storage media because it protects me from
accidentally modifying or deleting files. Also I don't have to worry about HDD
reliability issues like head crashes, circuit board failures, etc., and it's
easier to keep optical discs in cold storage with zero maintenance effort.

While hard drives have been getting bigger and cheaper every year, is anyone
else disappointed that write-once media technology has stagnated?

A rough timeline of when writable optical discs became popular and affordable:
CD-R 700MiB (~2000); DVD+/-R (+DL) 4.7GB/8.5GB (~2005); BD-R 25GB (~2010);
BD-R XL 100GB (~2015). Various holographic discs have been proposed but are
vaporware. The problem today is that all these disc formats are tiny compared
to the 10TB HDDs you can pick up easily.

~~~
jsjohnst
My big issue is that optical media reliability isn’t where it needs to be for
me to want to trust it for long term archival storage. Yes, some brands and
media types are better than others, but it’s still enough a concern that I
feel I can’t trust it in general.

~~~
ofrzeta
You can try M-DISC that's supposed to store data a thousand years. No idea if
it keeps its promises, though.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

~~~
Avery3R
English link
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

------
hongzi
I think storing movie archives is really a nice fit for this technology.
Reading/writing data on glass is too slow right now to host applications with
interactions. I would imagine read/write movie archive only happens once per
month or even years. That said, glass storage should also apply to never-
change log data like bank transaction history (or stale blocks in block
chains)

~~~
Verdex
We should probably store a bunch of video evidence of historical events before
we get the ability to do cheap and easy photo-realistic CGI on demand. There's
going to be so many alternative video evidence for everything that historians
are going to appreciate a known record that is difficult to update.

~~~
vijaybritto
What if some one mischievous records the fake video instead of the real video?
What if they get swapped post etching. I think the storage medium itself will
not secure stuff for the future!

------
smush
I hope to get this someday even at crazy prices. Permanent cold-storage of
digital data can 'kinda' be done with M-Disk Blu Rays, but that is estimated
good for 1000 years...which probably translates in reality to 100 or less
years. DVDs, HDDs etc. have severe bit rot in comparison to that and are all
likely to be gone within a decade +- a few years depending on medium and
storage.

This glass? Write it and don't physically smash it and it should be good to go
for the rest of your life +, if the claims in this article hold up. Then
digital data will have a cold-storage equivalent to a piece of paper. Stick it
in a box in the attic, get it out in 80 years and as long as its not smashed
or burned it should be GTG.

~~~
omarhaneef
I am confused by your comparison of M-Disk Blu Rays (estimated 1000 years, but
actually only 100 years) with the glass (rest of your life+).

Are you anticipating living a lot longer than 100 more years?

And even then, isn't the M-Disk a better tech by your math?

~~~
smush
The M-Disc claim of 1000 years is based on a few estimated tests and while
they mostly hold up, we have objective proof that glass left alone over 1000
years does not change to the point that if you wrote something on year x,
time-travelled with your reader to year 1000x , the reader would be unable to
read it.

I don't expect to crack 90 years myself, but my great-great-grandchildren
might want or need whatever data there is on that glassdrive, even if it is
only pictures and not something important like legal documents.

The 'rest of your life+' claim is simply my shorthand for saying that while
the glass will likely last for thousands of years, how long the readers exist
that can read that particular glassdrive and interpret its data (ANSI or
Unicode text, PNG or PDF display capability) may or may not last as long as
the glassdrive itself can (see Voyneuch manuscript which exists, but we no
longer can read and interpret it).

~~~
mywacaday
I am aware of a company that user to sell a long term DVD like storage disk
that they claimed would last for 100+ years, 5-6 years in disks started to
lose data, I now take lifetime claims with a big pinch of salt.

~~~
chihuahua
Indeed, I think of those claims as a mixture of optimism, wishful thinking,
and marketing drivel. How can someone claim that it lasts for 100 years,
unless you have tested that claim by waiting 100 years and then verifying that
the data is still there ?

After many years of experience with CD-R and DVD-R, one can say that those
disks are good for at least 3 years. But we can only say that because lots of
people have successfully read CD-Rs that were 3 years old.

Also, they can sell those "100-year" disks with these claims, and when
customers lose data after 5-6 years, the company just says "oh that's too bad,
maybe you stored them where the temperature fluctuated by more than +/\- 0.1
degrees Celsius ?" and you have no recourse other than not giving them more of
your money in the future.

------
52-6F-62
So it's a modification of this process I guess:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage)

[https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/](https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/)

------
dhosek
Anyone else disappointed the quartz glass isn’t shaped like the stick-like
storage units that appeared in the Superman movies?

------
godzillabrennus
Mark Russinovich gets to play with some cool tools. I still remember how
advanced Winternals software was for sys admins. Microsoft really got some
sharp guys in that acquisition.

------
max_
Is this related to what Vint Cerf called “Digital Vellum” [0]

[0]:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0IabXOLdbAQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0IabXOLdbAQ)

*PS not sure if I have done the reference thing twice.

------
jlizzle30
> For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last
> hundreds of years...

I'd love to see a project preserve data for tens of thousands of years. The
Egyptians did this by creating tombs. Surely we could do better.

~~~
nayuki
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project)
; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-
Rosetta) ;
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation)

------
strig
> The team has baked, boiled, microwaved, demagnetized and scoured similar
> pieces of glass with steel wool — with no loss to the data stored inside.

That's really cool.

------
knolax
How do they know that it's going to last 1000 years? What kind of properties
do you have to control for to insure that?

~~~
knolax
ensure _

------
EricE
Neat - lossless archiving of stuff is actually pretty hard. This approach
seems to check a lot of critical boxes.

------
rkagerer
First we got Communicators... now Isolinear Chips... I can't wait for
Transporters!

~~~
rkagerer
[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31876/12-star-trek-
gadge...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31876/12-star-trek-gadgets-now-
exist)

------
annoyingnoob
That looks like a fun job.

