
Data Saved in Quartz Glass Might Last 300M Years - pmoriarty
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/data-saved-quartz-glass-might-last-300-million-years/
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gilrain
"Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast
... CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s."

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't
belong.

~~~
crashedsnow
[http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif)

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rbanffy
"The dots represent information in binary form, a standard that should be
comprehensible even in the distant future"

Said by someone who never had to import Word files into OpenOffice.

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steve19
True ultra long term storage with decent storage capacity could prefix each
and every binary files with an ASCII text file detailing the file structure on
the binary in enough detail that a competent programmer could write a parser.

If you were still worried about that, all binary files could be duplicated in
ASCII (minus formatting etc.)

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LASR
And where does the information about the ASCII format go?

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steve19
Easy.

Any civilization advanced enough to read microscopic encoded data would be
advanced enough to do basic statistical analysis on ASCII encoded
English/whatever and work out what it is. The harder part is figuring out how
to understand English.

An example of this being done recently is MIT students decoding the ancient
language Ugaritic

[http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-
barzilay-0630](http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630)

~~~
rbanffy
300M years is a _very_ long time. Unless there is some continuity in the use
of the stored information, in a way it's documented, translated and
reinterpreted, there is no hope something alive 300M years from now, something
that will not be remotely human, will be able to understand it any more than
we understand the songs sponges sing each other.

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ejk314
It apparently has a data density similar to blu-ray. A better source:
[http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html](http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html)

~~~
oniTony
At quoted "1.5 GB/inch^2" they are comparing their 100 layer medium against a
single-layer 25GB bluray disc. At three~four layers, current bluray discs
offer 100~128GB of capacity.

Archival Disc spec brings optical media to 300GB now, 1TB on roadmap.[0] This
leaves current Quartz Glass an order of magnitude behind current optical
media.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc)

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kercker
Even if the data saved in Quartz Glass last 300M years, 300M years later, how
can they figure out what all these binary digit mean, without knowing the
format of the data.

For something lasting so far into the future, some clues must be left to help
someone in the future to extract the information from the media.

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6502nerdface
Maybe this would be a good medium for
[http://cosmicos.github.io/](http://cosmicos.github.io/)

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adrianN
It looks like The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta disc needs to step up its
game. It's only designed to last a couple of millennia.

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nolepointer
This article is from 2012.

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chrismbarr
This would be a good solution assuming you only needed to write once to your
archive. Since this is literally etched in glass, there's no way to edit any
data. Also, instructions on what to do with a box of glass someone finds 100
years from now would be helpful. :P

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ams6110
_The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long._

I don't see how that is relevant. The world could end tomorrow. Do we just
abandon long term data backup?

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Houshalter
IMO that's even more of a reason for this. If the world continues normally,
then old hard drives and CDs can just be copied onto new ones over and over
again. If something ever happens, then everything will be lost. With this, we
could preserve a huge amount of the world's knowledge forever.

However I see what they are trying to say. 300M years is a lot, when even 100
years would be great compared to current storage systems. And on that time
scale, the rate of bit rot is less important than other factors.

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dredmorbius
Schroedinger's Aperiodic Crystal, taken literally.

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forgottenacc56
I'm glad AOL floppy disks didn't last 300 million years.

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idibidiart
Superman's crystals, the ones that have encoded in them the full 3D HD movie
of his parents and the fate of Krypton. I knew science would eventually catch
up to sci fi :)

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gjmulhol
Quartz is not glass. Quartz is a crystal.

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gnoway
Quartz glass refers to fused quartz, which is a glass.

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

~~~
gjmulhol
You are indeed correct. This article uses quartz and quartz glass
interchangeably, so I assumed the author was making the sapphire/"sapphire
glass" error (because sapphire is never a glass) but upon checking out the
original article, you are right, they are working on fused silica.

