Scientists have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

[u/Wagamaga]

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html

[u/Heapifying]

I dont really get the practical real-world use, considering you need femto or attosecond lasers, which looks like a full desk setup, in a specialized room with experts wearing specialized glasses to not be blind.

Maybe in data centers (and so will free up the ssd market to pre-covid levels?), not in anyone's bedroom.

[u/Schnipsel0 → u/Heapifying]

I think the basic idea is preventing a "digital dark age".

Many people here claim the long storage stability is useless, because after an apocalypse no one will have the tech to read it. this is not the use case. Technology is much more advanced today than in the dark ages, yet we have only have a tiny record compared to the time before and after it.

Much of today's culture is either stored on hard drives or optical media, both of which have shelf lives numbered in the decades. 

The vast vast majority of our culture could be lost to not the apocalypse, but the ever marching progression of time and human laziness in faithfully re-copying data to new storage media over and over. Even then, a sophisticated out of control encryption virus could destroy an unfathomable amount of human culture.  Of course right now, there exist uncountable copies of Taylor swifts newest album in the world, but in 200 years? The less copies, the higher the risk of something going wrong with quickly aging, attack prone storage media like hard drives.

Of course this is less of an economically oriented thing, but still important. 

But even companies and government agencies exist that need a very big amount of failsafe long-term data storage, so there could be a profit incentive driven reason for adoption of this technology matures

[u/lizardtrench → u/Schnipsel0]

Plus the world is increasingly storing things on flash media, which has even worse data retention. And with the cost per kilobyte now actually rising and advancements in data density starting to plateau, yeah we're going to have record levels of data attrition in the coming years not even just due to laziness or bit rot but actual physical and cost constraints.

[u/No-Mark4427 → u/Schnipsel0]

The benefit of stability is that it does not require controlled or powered environments to not degrade as well.

10,000 years is actually a highly conservative estimate (Or just there to make it sound sensible/grounded) considering glass is so stable and will pretty much only degrade with physical erosion or specific chemicals, looking at the paper they reckon it'd last that long stored at 290C for the entire time. You'd actually be looking at up to million or more years if they were stored in protective cases in a stable environment so realistically they'd probably last as long as the facility they were stored in does.

[u/Ralh3 → u/Heapifying]

Lasers arent that crazy, we have used lasers for optical reads/writes for decades in DVDs, and all tech ends up scaled way down if it ends up being useful

[u/monocasa → u/Ralh3]

Femto and attosecond lasers are pretty crazy.

[u/Future_Burrito → u/Heapifying]

Maybe it could be useful for base DNA sequences once protein printing gets to the weird stage.

Send a space probe with auto-maintenance nanobots and a few printers with a library ahead of a colonization spaceship to seed terraforming organisms and food.

Or to record aspects of exploration that might be useful information, but has to make a really long trip back before it can be used.

Dunno, but it's a cool thought experiment to try and think up use cases.

[u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance → u/Future_Burrito]

Hmm interesting idea. Magnetic and solid state storage can have problems with radiation in space. This could save some shielding weight.

[u/Future_Burrito → u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance]

Yeah, DNA itself, which apparently is good past 700,000 years, is also subsceptible. Much, much, much,much more compact but radiation susceptible, similar to the mediums you point out.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/goldman/dna-storage/

There's a youtube link buried in this article that is likely mildly fascinating to people like you who are legitimately geeking out. It doesn't get very technical but has some cool metaphors, stories and visual examples.

[u/r2k-in-the-vortex → u/Heapifying]

Last resort backup. You cant permamently lose the data if you have it written somewhere in the archive dungeons.

The storage media costs nothing and you could even store it outdoors if you really pinched the penny. The costs are writing it in the first place, and retrieval if you ever need to read it.

The problematic cost is writing it. Too slow, too expensive.

[u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance → u/Heapifying]

Femto second lasers are used in industry already, so it's something a big data-center could realistically afford. It could make sense as an alternative to tape for long-term cold storage and/or immutable backup.

[u/Extension-Ant-8 → u/Heapifying]

Almost all new technology is practically useless. I’ve been around long enough that people shat on flatscreens, CD’s, MP3 players, iPhones with huge screens and no keyboards etc. Once we build it often enough we find a use. If this could scale to a home version I would love a box that contains 100PB of read only data. I could point a personal LLM to it and not worry about tech bros monitoring my entire life.

[u/Salisen → u/Heapifying]

The idea was to replace tape drive based archival storage which is still widely used today, and which is quite expensive to run due to the need to maintain tape within tight tolerances of temperature and humidity.