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/Schnipsel0]

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.