Microsoft develops ultra durable glass plates that can store several TBs of data for 10000 years::Project Silica’s coaster-size glass plates can store unaltered data for thousands of years, creating sustainable storage for the world
Of all the stuff I’ve seen in sci fi movies and tv shows, I really didn’t think the computer chips on glowing transparent plates was gonna become reality. What a crazy world this is.
Here, put this weird glowing crystal into the Heart of Gold’s navicom, it contains the location of the long lost planet of Magrathea.
Star Trek predicts another future technology; the isolinear chip.
Add: And the chips used on the original series were opaque, but roughly the same size.
The opacity is probably storage density.
I bet people in the 80’s said stuff like this when music started coming out on digital rainbow mirrors (CDs).
Nope! The futuristic aspect was that they didn’t jam.
“No more cassette players eating my $8 album!? I LOVE LIVING IN THE FUTURE!”
That was more the reaction to Sony mini-discs. Video players using large laser discs had been around for a while.
Mini-discs still feel futuristic for some reason.
Isolinear chips have arrived.
I hope it’ll be like those communicators in the expanse, those things look fun.
I want a glass computer that is on a manipulator strapped to my back that way it can float free and I can use both hands, then push a button to have it collapse back along the backside of my ribs.
Pfft just wait till we figure out Xenonite.
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That’s Glass-R but fot a few bucks more you can get a Glass-RW
Just watch out for Glass-RAM, it doesn’t work in most drives.
Excuse me, I was looking to download more glass RAM. Is it free?
So it’s great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I’m interested in if it was cheap enough.
“Bob, why the hell did you format this as ‘Jim sux dicks’?! You know that’s permanent, right?”
10K years later
Alien captain: Anything to report?
Alien: We need to find a being named “Jim”, sir…
We’ve got lots of Roman dick drawings, so it’s our turn to leave our mark on the future
If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD’s back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.
Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.
This… well roughly. People here say muh file formats etc. But you’re really going for the maximum lifetime, if its uncompressed text, it wouldn’t be too hard to reverse engineer if future people figure out that there’s data on there at all. The harder part may be extracting the data at all. We could also include instructions on how certain file formats can be read.
It’s is is still a great long term archive storage, and more likely the data would be transfered to a better storage device within a few 100 years (if we’re talking about archiving the present for future archologists that is)
How amazing would it be if we came across some tomb that was just filled with thousands of scrolls detailing the whole history of Rome and Greece and all those other empires from the BC years?
So its cd but fom the future
CDs aren’t expected to last more than 100 years in storage.
This is more like stone tablets for the future.
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Archeologist in 1000 years: "this glass has some interesting etching, must have had some religious significance.
Turns out to be the lewd anthropomorphic creatures glass plate
fertility ritual
Furrility Rituals.*
Maretility Rituals
Just petabytes of porn
Archaeologist in 1005 years: "We have translated the folder names on this glass storage device! The writings within refer to a important man named “Brazzers”, and there is another folder full of his correspondence to his “step sister” and someone named “Milf”.
The Prime Ejaculator
“There is only the true religion of the Void, these heretic artifacts must be destroyed”
“Aliens”
Some of the same technology was actually also used to create windows.
You can have my upvote, but I’m not happy about it
I’m pretty happy about it.
Logs into the SilicaArk long term storage system for the first time.
“Welcome Andy, would you like to use the optimistic theme or the pessimistic theme?”
Chooses optimistic. Types in command to show storage capacity.
“The glass is half full.”
Woooow
They’re called isolinear chips.
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Imagine long flat jolly ranchers…
I can see it.
I can see it, but I have no idea how to post images in comments.
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Is that from Star Trek?
Yup
Didn’t someone make a holographic cube some ten or so years ago with the same promises.
I never get excited by this stuff. If I see it in Best Buy, then I’ll believe it.
Many people have made such devices I think. There’s probably a guy somewhere with a shelf full of them.
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This is also the 10,000th time I’ve heard about this so there is that…
I almost literally yawned reading the title. “Journalists” regurgitating things they don’t understand and hyping them everytime like it’s the breakthrough of the century. I feel it waters down actual breakthroughs and makes people immune or at least apathetic to these stories because it’s the same thing over and over.
Ah, but did you know
THEY DID SURGERY ON A GRAPE
It’s working!
That’s a lot of start menu ads and telemetry code!
The goddamn telemetry code!!! Is ancient!! That’s why it’s so huge and slow
Cats: Challenge accepted.
10,000 TB of cat pics.
OMG :-(
Ah, shit… I guess my great, great, great, 100x great Martian grandkids will have to suffer leaked dickpics from ancient times.
They’ll be able to use generative AI on a dick pic to reconstruct your conscious, make you feel embarrassed, then delete you again
The real purpose of Roko’s Basilisk was discovered only to be rejected as absurd…
So I read many times that it can store “several TBs of data” but how many exactly? 2, 3, 5, 10?
Do they know exactly? Is it possible that they write 5 TBs and when they try to read it, they can only read like 3, losing the other 2 TBs?
They’re being so vague with the numbers that I really doubt how mature any of this is. Given some of the examples (photos, music, War & Peace) I’m guessing 3TB or so, but it’s a fluff article, so who knows.
I imagine it would depend on the size of the plate and the degree to which correcting codes are used for redundancy.
Just out of curiosity, I calculated that the article’s (War and Peace * 875,000) claim would net you less than 1TB of storage space (~973GB), assuming it was GZipped (and ~3x that if not).
The most concrete number we have is from another article (also on an official Microsoft page) that claims it’s upwards of 7TB.
Was it minority report or the matrix that showed humans storing data on glass?
Either way, this is pretty cool.
in The Expanse their ships are somehow powered/controlled by a shelf of things that look like this
Star Trek also has this.
And Star Craft and Stargate. Must be something a lot of sci-fi stuff has.
Minority Report had some glass storage stuff that was fun to see. He would insert a glass slide into the machine.
Thanks! That may have been the case I was thinking of.
It was Minority Report, during the sequence when Anderson is going through the footage of the murder in the beginning of the movie. One of the guys puts some video from a nearby computer into a small tablet -size piece of glass and hands it to Anderson who plugs it in and puts the video on the main screen.
We’ve got some pretty good glove mouse things so we’re just kidding the pre-cogs.
I think you’re thinking of Star Wars. Like episode 2 or something.
Definitely I’m Minority Report as well in several scenes
In 2001, HAL is disconnected through glass like components.
MS: it can last for 10000 years!
Me: have you tested that
MS: well no b-
Me: your company is not even 50 years old
MS: but we ran the simulations
Me: …
I really hate this like ‘in my imaginary world, where everything is perfect and not as much as an atom of dirt comes into contact with the product, and therefore nobody uses the product while it is sealed in a vacuum chamber, then hypothetically it will still be good in a billion years. MTBF = infinity. ship it.’
You make a good point, and it’s funny.
But we can make estimates for the endurance of various materials from today. And we know the limitations of most of our media is quite short. So having something that’s predicted to last a while is still a good thing, even if we don’t have empirical evidence yet.
Ignoring physical damage, by being crushed or said on fire. We know that some materials are not inherently stable. Like they haven’t reached their final molecular state. Especially in the presence of oxygen or other catalysts.
Papers a great example, a lot of paper, and a lot of ink used on paper can be acidic degrading the paper over time. So we know that what’s printed today, the vast majority of it, is not going to last very long. Just because of the acid ignoring all the other issues with paper and rot etc.
So if they have some stable glass material that can encode data, and is in molecular steady state, so it doesn’t want to degrade on its own. That changes the problem from how do you prevent this material from reacting to its own environment, to how do you prevent this material from being manually destroyed. It’s a different problem, but it’s an easier problem
Very good explanation. Thanks for that.
Also, with any storage system, it’s not “store it and forget it”. With something like this you’d store, then do testing in determined intervals, to ensure it’s still retrievable.
You’d also do replication and duplication. I.e. replicate the data on disparate and different media, with each location performing duplication onto new media as part of the ongoing testing/validation process, eventually leading to longer and longer intervals for testing/duplication.
or said on fire.
I don’t want to detract from your point, but I’m picturing Jaskier’s new skill being lyrical literalization in which he can said Geralt on fire just with the line “burn, witcher, burn”
Well said
I get where you’re coming from, but I also think it’s fair to say archaeologists have at least some insight into what happens to glass over long periods of time. Hopefully Microsoft has consulted with them.
Bruh, it’s quartz glass. Tf you think is going to happen to it?
Just some real world experience:
Many, but not all books made of paper have survived the last world war. I’m not so sure about all the glass plates.
It seems like it would make for a great replacement for Tape Backups that are currently used for long term storage. They are easy to write to but hard to read from and restore. It’ll probably be a great technology to put backups on especially if it lasts as long as they say. The challenge will probably come in with the specialized reading and writing laser / microscopes being expensive.
According to the article, they’re using their AI cloud service to decode the data, so it’s also likely so computationally expensive to decode that it won’t be practical. Seems more like a gimmick to woo investors that won’t actually ever see real world use, at least not any time soon. I suppose you could make the argument that you can back up data on it now, and hope reading it becomes more practical later, but then it’s more of a supplement to tape backup, rather than a replacement.
There is certainly an element of this being PR for Microsoft. But it is worth considering that a huge amount of computing is done in large data centers.
I think this fact could easily jump-start the use of a technology such as this. If it starts out where every large to mid-sized data center has a reader and writer shared among their thousands of customers it certainly would make it more viable.
I would guess the AI service is MS’s way of trying to make sure they control the technology. Hopefully, it eventually can get replaced by a local AI model rather than MS’s proprietary AI.
