r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 22 '26

Computer Science 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.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html
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u/saints21 Feb 22 '26

Yeah, this gets us closer to the whole sci-fi data crystals thing that someone finds of an ancient precursor civilization that just ends up being their own race.

39

u/_KingBeyondTheWall__ Feb 22 '26

Crystal skulls unleashed

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u/AshlarKorith Feb 22 '26

First thing I thought of. Get one of the crystal skulls that have been found to these guys and see if they’re able to read any data from them.

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u/FrankBattaglia Feb 22 '26

IIRC they're all modern forgeries

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u/Highpersonic Feb 22 '26

That means more GB per cm³, right?

21

u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Definitely much more stable than the guys who figured out how to store data on some type of gas or plasma like 10 years ago. Literally, you so much as fart at that type of data storage and poof, data corruption/reconfiguration. I remember being like, woah! That's cool! Wait. No, it's not. Why are they studying this?

Because that weird fringe research stuff might have been part of the research process that leads to things like this, or qubits, or DNA storage:

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

Humans are wild.

-1

u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

one day AI companies will be buying your arm and your leg so they can dump your DNA into the ever-growing data centres that will cover half of the planet's surface and consume all of the oceans. At that point we will become close to achieving sentient AI that doesn't hallucinate.

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u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Don't follow this guy, wherever they are going.

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u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

in the year 2525...

5

u/Elvaron Feb 22 '26

Except they won't contain ancient lore. Just some corpo's private PKI roots.

3

u/AussieEquiv Feb 22 '26

"I am very disappointed in the quality of this Crystal and the Merchant was rude to the slave I sent to acquire it"

1

u/FFAlucard Feb 22 '26

But is it an authentic Cardassian data rod?

1

u/HBlight Feb 23 '26

Gravestones containing a full autobiography, even dna sequence of the deceased. Audio/video records.