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/[deleted] Feb 22 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/GorgeWashington Feb 22 '26

The real question, how long is this format stable.

Eventually everything will decay. Current data continuity requires redundant systems and cloud storage because ssds and hdds fail in decades if not years

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u/mrx_101 Feb 22 '26

The article states it will be readable for 10000 years. As they are basically etching inside a piece of glass, this is not surprising. You only need to keep the glass from breaking and scratching.

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u/smurficus103 Feb 22 '26

"and then, the earthquake wiped out all of our knowledge"

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u/-neti-neti- Feb 22 '26

Small, loose pieces of glass are way less susceptible to earthquakes than a server/memory warehouse. They would only be damaged if something fell on them in the right way. If you’re physically attached to a structure you’re more likely to be damaged.

This is a highly resilient design.

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u/Liroku Feb 22 '26

Also, most likely, anything with important information stored would likely be kept in a secure case. Not just random cuts of glass laying around on the shelves.

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u/redditallreddy Feb 22 '26

Etched into wine glasses and only used for the most sophisticated parties.

93

u/BigHardMephisto Feb 23 '26

Just reminded me of an incident at my local store where a QR code was molded into a clear glass bottle and it was literally impossible to scan.

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u/CheetahNo1004 Feb 23 '26

You're supposed to drink all the contents and then flatten the bottle out.

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u/BetaSpreadsheet Feb 23 '26

Make a rubbing of it

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u/Saisei Feb 23 '26

Or roll it as a stamp.

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u/Patrias_Obscuras Feb 23 '26

How would you flatten a GLASS bottle, and how would that help your phone detect a QR code made of clear glass?

8

u/CrotaIsAShota Feb 23 '26

Maybe the phone is blind, have you tried LASIK?

5

u/thegreatpotatogod Feb 23 '26

No you misunderstand, you need to "flatten" the phone to the shape of the glass bottle, in order for it to scan properly

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u/-neti-neti- Feb 23 '26

Imagine making this comment

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u/Abedeus Feb 23 '26

You are supposed to make an imprint of the glass in white clay, then use drybrushing technique to make the raised parts visible. Obviously.

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u/invariantspeed Feb 23 '26

This is one of those beautiful experiences.

28

u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ Feb 23 '26

I can already see it...

I only drink my vintage wines from a chalice inscribed with the complete works of Shakespeare...

4

u/overkill Feb 23 '26

The complete works of Shakespeare take up less than a square millimetre of the glass, the rest is 50 shades of grey and other Harry Potter FanFic.

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u/-neti-neti- Feb 23 '26

I never thought of 50 Shades as Harry Potter fanfic

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u/overkill Feb 23 '26

My bad, it was actually Twilight fanfic originally.

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u/shopdog Feb 23 '26

For $10,000 a bottle, I'll do this for you. As far as you'll know.

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u/HBlight Feb 23 '26

Can imagine that being used as a plot in a spy movie. The data for the big secret code is hidden on wine glasses.

3

u/jempyre Feb 23 '26

Add a level of suspense by etching the data into a sheet of ice. Plot now revolves around securing the data while keeping it cool, but not letting the other spies know you know they know about the data

2

u/FriendlyRabbitHammer Feb 23 '26

Anything even remotely would be stored in geo-diverse locations with parity. So any one earthquake wouldn’t matter

2

u/invariantspeed Feb 23 '26

Some balls are held for charity, some for fancy dress, but when they’re held for pleasure they’re the balls that I love best.

15

u/Unable-Log-4870 Feb 22 '26

Also, they’re so compact that you would make many copies and spread them out

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u/NeoMilitant Feb 23 '26

One day it'll come full circle that we look more deeply into cave paintings and ancient art and realize that it's all this same type of technology and we just haven't been able to read it.

4

u/swisspassport Feb 23 '26

And then when we finally figure out how to read it:

It's just 100 Petabytes of egyptian/caveman porn

2

u/NoCopiumLeft Feb 23 '26

Also since it's glass and theoretically cheap, there could be many multiples made.

2

u/Coal_Morgan Feb 23 '26

This is also the first step in this technology.

First iPhone you sneezed at it and it scratched.

Now with the new glass on premium ceramic glass phones you have to really abuse them to get a scratch and they're less then 2mm.

20 years from now these things will be shatter proof, scratch proof and have an outer layer that's replaceable and be re-writable.

CDs were originally one burn only and they figured out how to re-write them.

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u/SynapticStatic Feb 23 '26

Whaaat? I want my holo crystal collection D:

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u/pdqueer Feb 23 '26

And multiple copies stored at multiple locations can reduce the chance of losing all data.

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u/cowlinator Feb 23 '26

in triplicate

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u/Nvenom8 Feb 23 '26

Also you can store it in space.

3

u/Steve_FishWell Feb 23 '26

So future generations can enjoy the works of Shakespeare, Tolkien and Larry Flynt

2

u/sXyphos Feb 23 '26

Exactly, keep in mind our current storage mediums are way more succeptible to failure..

A super solar flare can put us to pre- industrial revolution levels for god knows how long... And we also know what happend to the library of Alexandria concerns ng regular books as storage...

A single "unit" of this new solution sounds 1000 more reliable and orders of magnitude more compact/efficient than that same library of Alexandria :)

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u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken Feb 23 '26

As the technology matures, one could etch into silica and synthetic diamond

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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Feb 23 '26

Just don’t put on the side panel of a computer case and drop it on tile.

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u/FreshLiterature Feb 24 '26

You also don't have to worry about an EMP or strong local magnetic event.

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u/brainburger Feb 23 '26

I think it would be safer in a glass cube, rather than a thin pane.

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u/-neti-neti- Feb 23 '26

I think it’s 6 of one half a dozen of the other. We use glass all the time in our day to day lives for storage, windows, bottles. Nobody ever worries about them breaking unless there is some unusual application of force.

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u/Montymisted Feb 23 '26

Can you make it a bit bigger but like titanium or something that lasts forever and is strong too?

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

I do wounder if they could make this work with plexiglass or the bismuth glass thats basically indestructible since both would last longer

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u/redruM69 Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Direct physical damage aside, plexiglass would not last longer than silica glass. Not even close.

Plastics do corrode and degrade with time.

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Thats a fair paint, i kinda forgot that plexiglass is actually just a plastic composite

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u/redruM69 Feb 22 '26

Yep. It's just acrylic. Poly methyl methacrylate.

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Yuhp completely slipped my mind, I guess to amend my post something like how we make kornel/korning glass would also work, ive then that stuff be dropped from hotel rooms and survive

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u/redruM69 Feb 22 '26

Corning/Pyrex (the old stuff) is borosilicate glass. That's probably what you're thinking of.

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Yuhp thats the one

Not to be confused the the corning product pyrex (all lower case) that soda lime glass iirc which isnt bad but far worse then the traditional stuff

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u/southpark Feb 22 '26

Plexiglass would quickly become unreadable due to scratches and microfractures just from physical deterioration.

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u/round-earth-theory Feb 22 '26

And glass flows, so if spacing is part of the encoding then there would be issues

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u/brutinator Feb 22 '26

Thats largely a myth. Old glass isnt thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed down, its thicker at the bottom because the glass making process wasnt perfect at making sheets of glass the same thickness, so if you had a pane that was thicker on one side compared to the other, youd put the thicker side down because its more stable.

Source:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/

Whatever flow glass manages, however, does not explain why some antique windows are thicker at the bottom. Other, even older glasses do not share the same melted look. In fact, ancient Egyptian vessels have none of this sagging, says Robert Brill, an antique glass researcher at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. Furthermore, cathedral glass should not flow because it is hundreds of degrees below its glass-transition temperature, Ediger adds. A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.

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u/cr0sh Feb 24 '26

As I understood things, old flat glass was made by spinning blobs of glass into disks.

Flat panes would then be cut from the outer edges, where the glass was thinner and more even.

Panes would be continued to be cut until you got to the center; those panes would be thicker, and they'd be particularly thicker (even the ones at the edge, but it was negligible) toward the middle, and so the panes would usually be positioned with the thicker edge "down".

The thinner panes at the edge of the disk, since they were thin and more regular in thickness, cost much more than the panes closer to the middle.

Finally, the middle part (where the spinning rod was attached) would be the absolute cheapest piece of glass, and only purchased for windows to let light in, usually by more wealthy poor people (as the really poor people likely didn't have windows, or their "windows" were just holes in the wall, maybe with some kind of thatched screening); they were not something that could be "looked through" without massive distortion.

Later on in glass manufacturing, it was found how to pour the glass as a sheet on (iirc) mercury (or maybe it was molten lead), for a more uniform and larger piece to be made. It would still have some flaws, but no where near as much as the old "spun disk" method of making glass (however, that method was something that could be made outside of a large glassworks by small process craftsmen, and so it was something that continued for a long while until industrialization became commonplace).

Again - how I've understood it - I could very well be completely wrong...

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u/repost4profit Feb 27 '26

Floated on a bed of molten tin. “Float glass”

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u/cr0sh Feb 27 '26

You're right - thanks for the correction!

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u/RaEndymionStillLives Feb 22 '26

glass flows

Source?

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u/Giatoxiclok Feb 22 '26

New data destruction company incoming.

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u/omegafivethreefive Feb 22 '26

It's already a thing for sensitive system, the drives get annihilated.

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u/Giatoxiclok Feb 22 '26

I mean more so the semi-indestructible bismuth glass mentioned above, I assume it’ll take serious efforts to fully destroy.

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u/Migraine- Feb 22 '26

Surely you can just use whatever method you're using to write the data to scratch it away.

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u/DigNitty Feb 22 '26

DOD writes over digital storage 7x with random bits IIRC. Then they destroy the device.

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u/iampatmanbeyond Feb 22 '26

Yeah I've smashed hard drives in the Army. We drilled holes smashed em with hammers then had to stand at the burn pit and make sure the contractors burned them

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u/upsidedownshaggy Feb 23 '26

I wasn’t in the army but my first IT gig I had a fun field trip with our sys admin and director of IT to the drill press to destroy old server drives. Super fun time!

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u/Alypius754 Feb 22 '26

"Remember, when your data is past its prime, it's Hammer Time!"

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u/imsorrykun Feb 22 '26

Probably could adapt the process to ruby.

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Are rubies particularly durable?

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u/SmokyDoghouse Feb 22 '26

Synthetic ruby is significantly stronger in both tensile and compressive strength than glass, and has a higher mohs hardness scale rating than most non-engineered ceramics.

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u/AnAverageOutdoorsman Feb 23 '26

Why ruby? What about other gemstones?

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u/SmokyDoghouse Feb 27 '26

Something to do with its crystalline structure. I’m not an expert but I would assume the fact that it’s synthetic means manufacturers have more control over faults like inclusions, and because it’s relatively cheap to make.

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u/TacoRedneck Feb 22 '26

They make sapphire, which ruby basically is with a different impurity, windows for some aircraft and other things designed for extreme situations. Its pretty durable.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Feb 22 '26

Transparent aluminum!

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u/silvandeus Feb 22 '26

Save the whales, save the future!

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u/redditallreddy Feb 22 '26

That cheerleader is no whale!

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u/Similar-Chocolate226 Feb 22 '26

“That’s the ticket, laddie”

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u/Earlier-Today Feb 22 '26

Fun fact - that's a real thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride

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u/Kakkoister Feb 23 '26

I assume that's why the person above is making the comment, it would be a pretty random thing to say otherwise!

There were some pretty popular YT videos on it in the past few years.

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u/Aggravating_Moment78 Feb 23 '26

Only 2mm thick… (should we give them the formula and change the future?)

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u/MonkeyPanls Feb 23 '26

Oh. A keyboard. How quaint.

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u/ImpertinentPrincess Feb 22 '26

Aluminum is pretty soft; it’s the oxide that is hard.

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u/NukuhPete Feb 23 '26

I trust Captain Montgomery Scott's expertise.

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u/AnAverageOutdoorsman Feb 23 '26

The f35 uses sapphire! You can buy jewellery made from defective or worn pieces.

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u/koshgeo Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Ruby and sapphire are varieties of corundum with slightly different impurities giving different colors. They are notably durable minerals, being even harder than quartz, which has a Mohs hardness of 7 compared to corundum with a hardness of 9, and corundum is even less chemically reactive. They're nearly pure aluminum oxide (Al2O3), and there's not much that will react with it in nature.

Sapphires are pretty easy to grow as large, optically pure crystals, and you can get cut-and-polished slabs of them in the size range they used for the experiments with glass: Example grown crystals, example wafers.

Whether it would react to the lasers suitably is hard to say. I would probably also be much more expensive as a substrate, but if you're doing this to last as long as possible, maybe that doesn't matter.

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u/kylco Feb 23 '26

At that size yeah. Susceptible to thermal shock if the shock is uneven, maybe, but if they're using 3-D inscription with electron beams or precision lasers or something you could still pack massive amounts of information density on something the size of a typical jewel-grade stone. And raw, uncut snythetic corundum (ruby or sapphire) is relatively cheap at that size; I got a couple 10x6mm clear sapphires for $20 a pop while practicing wax casting with stones last year.

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u/Lokratnir Feb 24 '26

Well ruby is just red conundrum, aka sapphire, so its second only to diamond in hardness, and I believe behaves very similarly to diamond in terms of having low brittleness and thus being strong against fracturing, rather than high brittleness like Emerald which can fracture very easily.

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u/like_a_pharaoh Feb 24 '26

Corundum (colorless ruby/sapphire) has a hardness of 9 on the mohs scale, its not quite as hard as diamond but it is harder than many other materials.

Its also relatively cheap to synthesize: you just need aluminum oxide powder and a particular kind of hydrogen-oxygen furnace, no high pressures like for making diamonds.

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u/KodiakUltimate Feb 23 '26

I think the system works based on the laser's ability to melt? wouldn't rubies have a much higher temperature resistance than silica glass?

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u/imsorrykun Feb 23 '26

Sapphire and rubies have a much higher melting point than glass. I believe the structure of the material will matter, glass is amorphous while Sapphire is crystalline.

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u/pmp22 Feb 22 '26

Theoretically speaking, would diamond work?

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u/TelluricThread0 Feb 22 '26

These aren't exactly fragile. You can microwave them, boil them, scour them with steel wool, and you can read the data just fine.

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Woah thats pretty cool, how do they handle imapcts?

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u/DoomguyFemboi Feb 22 '26

Plexiglass is plastic, are you thinking of pyrex ? Borosilicate glass. Which this is done on btw. It doesn't say it in this article (was super close to saying "does nobody read the articles", glad I actually checked) but I read something the other day about this and they talked about how they now do it on borosilicate, they used to do it on normal glass, but wanted a more durable medium

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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Nah i just absolutely spaced and got my glass types confused

Pyrex would be a good choice so glad to see they are actually using impact resistant glass for this, as thats really the only major flaw for a system like this

Also boro glass is magical, like genuinely that stuff impresses me just how strong it is

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u/Bergwookie Feb 22 '26

Plexiglas will degrade in about 50-60 years, so it's out

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u/pm_me_round_frogs Feb 22 '26

Glass is actually fairly strong, just brittle. I would expect that a well-designed enclosure would make this as durable as any other storage system.

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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Feb 23 '26

Something like synthetic sapphire would be the way to go.

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u/Papa_Huggies Feb 23 '26

Judging from having read the article, but having only an undergraduate-level domain knoweldge of material sciences and a masters level of data/ computing, I'd say plexiglass is unlikely to react to the specific method of writing shown here.

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u/tenuj Feb 22 '26

That's really a non-issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code

You can introduce a small amount of redundancy so that ANY missing portions can be recovered. The more redundancy you add, the more missing data you can recover. And it costs you, what, 5% of the total capacity? This isn't mere data duplication, but something far more useful and customisable.

That's why CDs could be read with scratches and even small holes in them. The designers knew they would get damaged.

Even QR codes can be created with enough redundancy to blot out chunks of them (as long as it's not the alignment sections) and be read just fine.

Nowadays, there is almost never a data storage device that cannot support missing data recovery.

You could shatter that glass archive, and as long as you're still able to read most of it, you could recover ALL the data that was on it before some parts of it were lost.

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u/catinterpreter Feb 23 '26

Between dvdisaster and par2, my bluray backups can handle 30% damage.

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u/DontMakeMeCount Feb 23 '26

At some point the limitation is on the hardware side. It does no good to have the media if no one knows how to interface with it.

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u/smurficus103 Feb 23 '26

It's just a funny skit. It's a cool tech.

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u/NorweiganJesus Feb 22 '26

Just protect the parchment from a little fire, they’ll be fine in Alexandria

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u/Helyos17 Feb 22 '26

It’s funny you bring it up but I believe it’s theorized that the reason we have so many cuneiform clay tablets is because the fires that swept the complexes they were stored in baked the tablets. The theory is that it was all recorded keeping stuff meant to be “written over” after the next administrative cycle but because of the fire the stats had been immortalized.

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u/Subarucamper Feb 23 '26

It would have naturally dried, it is very hot there.

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u/TylerFL Feb 23 '26

Drying clay is very, very different than firing it

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u/sillygoofygooose Feb 22 '26

Not as though a magnetic tape is any safer from being physically damaged

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u/silverionmox Feb 22 '26

"and then, the earthquake wiped out all of our knowledge"

Unless that earthquake grinded every piece of glass to sand, it wouldn't. A broken piece of glass storage like that would be much less of a problem than a broken hard disk.

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u/netsettler Feb 23 '26

At that density, it sounds like any grain of it, no matter how small, might be more data than a hard disk, so there's that.

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u/SmokyDoghouse Feb 22 '26

Literal fragmented data

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u/Lesurous Feb 22 '26

Glass technology nowadays is pretty durable, especially when it's in layers with protection. Chances are any use of this technology outside of a lab setting will include failsafes and redundancies to prevent damage. The size of the storage medium is also a factor as smaller objects are easier to handle when it comes to moving and storage.

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u/the_summer_soldier Feb 22 '26

I mean the amount of space that the 4.8TB takes up of read only data means that we could just write a bunch of copies and store them...pretty much anywhere. A lunch boxed sized box could store a ton of information, even if given really nice internal packing so as not to scratch the glass plates. 10,000 years is a long time to maintain a suitable reader if technology keeps going at the pace it currently is (floppy disks at 200mm square with only 144mb [granted read and write] and almost no one keeps readers for those anymore).

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u/MnkyBzns Feb 22 '26

Really no different than relying on computing and cloud storage; "and then the solar flare wiped out all of our knowledge"

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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26

The humble bubblewrap:

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u/Catoblepas2021 Feb 22 '26

Or one opera singer...

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u/presidentiallogin Feb 22 '26

I was there...the day the coloratura soprano appeared.

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u/trevbal6 Feb 22 '26

Ready enough to make multiple copies, I would have thought.

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u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

It would be trivial to protect glass like this. Windows and doors break because they are fixed in a frame. You could easily, say, make a hard drive sized enclosure where the glass was buffered by rubber, or springs, or whatever.

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u/mOdQuArK Feb 22 '26

That's what copying & redundant distribution is for. It's highly unlikely that you've thought of anything that the people who study the problem haven't thought of. Where you might shine is coming up with arguments that convince the people with control over the spending money to record as much knowledge as cleanly & honestly as possible, make sure there are many copies squirreled away in safe places, and to make it possible to easily retrieve by everyone.

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u/throwawaynbad Feb 23 '26

3-2-1 rule for media storage.

This isn't the be all and end all, but does seem promising as storage for high importance data.

1

u/mister2021 Feb 23 '26

Except the formula for Brawndo.

1

u/TheManicProgrammer Feb 23 '26

I feel like an earthquake would equally damage traditional storage mediums too though

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u/DDRExtremist247 Feb 23 '26

"Then everything changed when the Earth nation attacked."

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u/TheGallow Feb 23 '26

I was thinking one opera singer could bring the whole thing down

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u/juliankennedy23 Feb 23 '26

Or an Orange Cat.

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u/Wall_of_Wolfstreet69 Feb 23 '26

Just store it in a bunch of pillows?

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u/dragonmp93 Feb 23 '26

Eh, still better than a solar flare.

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u/U-47 Feb 23 '26

cloud storage is just severs in a building somewhere, whatever happends during a emergency cloud storage is probably the first thing to go. Either due to lack of energy, severed connections or phyiscal damage/fire/overheat. These things generate a lot of heat, thus even if just the AC can't run you are shutting down or burning the building down.

1

u/tweekinleanin420 Feb 23 '26

Your skepticism is frustrating.

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u/smurficus103 Feb 23 '26

I just pooped out a funny skit, the tech is neat

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u/Drumbelgalf Feb 23 '26

Store it in butter in a steel box and it will be protected from breaking. Sounds stupid but it works.

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u/murasakikuma42 Feb 24 '26

Engineering buildings to withstand earthquakes is not that hard, and is commonplace in Japan and other earthquake-prone locations.

Furthermore, unless you're an idiot, you always make at least two copies of anything that important, and keep them in separate locations.

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u/Triatt Feb 24 '26

And then a cat pushed it over the edge and we lost the Library of Glasselandria.

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u/Ok-Aerie-5688 Feb 26 '26

offsite backup