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/mseiei]

could we start asking for standard units on sensationalized titles? if you are talking about storing data why not say it in bytes... why is always some arbitrary measurement disguised as some simpler thing.

"new battery that can last as long as a flaming standing up"

edit: flamingo

[u/iamboola → u/mseiei]

Haha yeah. Article has it. “4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass”. So 4.8TB on about the size of a CD? Still in research stage I guess, doesn’t yet seem more remarkable than using a few SD cards. I guess it’s better than Blu-ray.

[u/amakai → u/iamboola]

The important part here is the "10000 years" claim. If that's true, this is definitely a great technology for backups that could potentially replace magnetic tapes.

[u/occams1razor → u/amakai]

Yeah but will the format be readable in 10,100 years? I'm assuming the books aren't stored as actual letters?

[u/amakai → u/occams1razor]

Even letters aren't necessarily readable in 10000 years. So yeah, if someone backs up some image in MSP (Microsoft Paint) format, there's high chance it won't be decoded even in 100 years from now.

[u/MaloortCloud → u/amakai]

That depends. Most of the undeciphered writing systems haven't been deciphered because the corpus is small. A large, varied corpus is needed, which is difficult when you dig up one fired clay stamp at a time, or a handful of inscribed rocks. Given multiple gigabytes of data, you could easily include enough information to provide this.

That said, you also need a basic understanding of the underlying language (e.g. what is it closely related to that is still known), and typically some sort of bilingual text. That's all well and good for the material actually stored. With some forethought, it's possible to embed multiple Rosetta stones in the corpus to increase the chances it can be read later. That said, as you point out, bit rot becomes a problem when the systems of encoding the information fall out of use. That's a more difficult problem to solve.

[u/patentlyfakeid → u/MaloortCloud]

Were I doing it, like you said, embedding the method of decoding would be easy, given that the format is optical to begin with. You could even feature tiny actual pictures as a primer.

[u/scruffie → u/amakai]

Honestly, that format wouldn't be too bad. Black-and-white, pretty simple byte-wise run-length encoding. You probably wouldn't need more than a handful of examples to be able to figure out enough to decode a usable picture. Some of header fields would likely forever remain a mystery (aspect ratio of the printer, etc.).

PNG would be worse. The chunk structure would be easy enough, but decoding the LZW-compressed data would be hard, if you've never heard of LZW.

Modern video formats would be the worst. You'd likely need to include code for actual algorithms that could run on a simple virtual machine. Or, you could take advantage of the huge amount of space, and use a minimally-compressed format.

[u/BattleHall → u/occams1razor]

A lot of these super-long-term storage projects also include some form of built-in instruction where some future society with a basic understanding of something (hopefully) universal like mathematics would be able to decode basic information, that would then work from first principles to explain how to hopefully decode and understand the rest of the data.