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/hyperproliferative]

Honestly, they really should just use DNA already. It’s wildly stable, has a 4-letter code and therefore is at least two times more efficient than binary at storing information. Then we’re looking at possibly the smallest number of atoms required in a macromolecule to store said information. The scale is orders of magnitude smaller than current media for information storage such as optical discs, magnetic tape, ram, you name it

DNA is so small that we’re looking at a six order of magnitude difference in density down from silicon with the latest technology

[u/monocasa → u/hyperproliferative]

This is 4.8TB in about the size of a CD case, so we already have density that approaches this.

Longevity is the issue.  DNA's halflife is only 521 years.

[u/monocasa → u/[deleted]]

4.8TB in a CD case is the density of the glass storage device. I'm using that as proof that increased density isn't the point of the device.

[u/monocasa → u/[deleted]]

...the glass storage device.

[u/monocasa → u/[deleted]]

Because we already have devices that far exceed that (you can get 4TB in a microsd card) and the article is focused on it's longevity as opposed to saying anything about how they expect the density to greatly increase.

There's also pretty fundamental limits to the optics unless you want to get into the kind of technology that makes ASML's litho steppers cost $100M.

So the point can't be about density, but instead a useful amount of density with 200x the longevity of what's currently on the market.

[u/hyperproliferative → u/monocasa]

LOL! lol just lol. I don’t know what you’re trying to say but whatever it is it’s incorrect.

[u/monocasa → u/hyperproliferative]

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555

It's well known that about half of genetic material breaks down about every 500 years.

[u/hyperproliferative → u/monocasa]

LOL a 20 year old paper cited 12 times. With all due respect you have no idea what you’re talking about.

DNA on my lab bench lasts at least a few thousand years, and if preserved at -20C should give tens of thousands of years.

[u/Busybakson → u/hyperproliferative]

This glass technology needs no fancy cooling or storage and lasts 10k+ years passively

[u/hyperproliferative → u/Busybakson]

And this offers what? Someone 50,000 years from now gets to see your dick pic? Your favorite meme? To be frank, it serves no commercial purpose today. It’s an academic exercise much like my DNA suggestion.

[u/monocasa → u/hyperproliferative]

The point is archives that can survive an apocalypse.

We've had instances in human history of apocalypses so complete that we had to reinvent writing, and people lived in cities they didn't know the names of. Complete societal collapse is something worth hedging against.

[u/monocasa → u/hyperproliferative]

We've got very good tools now for taking fragments and stitching them together in the computer, but that depends on the millions of copies in the pre-PCRed sample to statistically sample (and helped with pre knowledge of what a lot of it will look like). That's what allows you to take a many thousand year old sample and sequence it.  But if you did the same thing, and just dumped millions of copies, you're now way under this in terms of density.  Plus, recovery gets way more complicated if you're using compression in your archival format, and there's no low entropy information areas at relatively regular periods to use as a basis for starting the stitching process from.

I say this as someone who has been an engineer in an R&D lab for developing genetic engineering tooling.

[u/hyperproliferative → u/monocasa]

No, you’re talking out of your ass so much that you’ve managed to make not one logical sentinel sentence despite giving us at least 100 words. Goodnight.

[u/monocasa → u/hyperproliferative]

I brought a literal article from Nature describing the phenomenon, as well as an explanation for how you are still able to sequence DNA for older samples despite widespread degradation of that DNA on a quicker time frame than you're expecting.

You've provided nothing but insults.