Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s.
The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz glass that Hitachi says can preserve information for hundreds of millions of years with virtually no degradation.
The prototype is made of a square of quartz two centimeters wide and two millimeters thick. It houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond laser, which produces extremely short pulses of light. The dots represent information in binary form, a standard that should be comprehensible even in the distant future and can be read with a basic optical microscope. Because the layers are embedded, surface erosion would not affect them.
The medium has a storage density slightly better than that of a CD. Additional layers could be added, which would increase the density. But the medium is more remarkable for its durability. It is waterproof and resistant to chemicals and weathering, and it was undamaged when exposed to 1,000-degree heat for two hours in a test. The results of that experiment led Hitachi to conclude that the quartz data could last hundreds of eons.
“If both readers and writers can be produced at a reasonable price, this has the potential to greatly change archival storage systems,” says Ethan Miller, director for the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The medium could be ideal for safekeeping a civilization's most vital information, museum holdings or sacred texts. The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long. “Pangaea broke up less than several hundred million years ago,” Miller adds. “Many quartz-based rocks from that time are now sand on our beaches—how would this quartz medium fare any differently?”
This article was originally published with the title Super Long-Term Storage.
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6 Comments
Add Comment"guess I'll have to buy the White Album again" - Jay, MIB.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn apocryphal description of the tablets of the Ten Commandments and the ancient Sumerian "Tablet of Destinies" stated that they were made of a "lapis-colored glass". Hmmm... Neolithic data storage!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this300 Million Years? Gee, either scientificamerican has to start hiring editors or fire their headline writers - now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBury them on a moon somewhere - in a big black monolith.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI love the egos involved. What data will be relevant to "humans" even a million years from now? Sacred texts? Will we even be the same species in a million years let alone a hundred million years? I can imagine the debates, we did NOT evolve from humans. Creationists record that the Earth was created in six days 6000 years ago to be stored in a quartz crystal for millions of years, yeah right. They "store" the crystal in Los Angeles but with the movement of the San Andreas Fault it ends up off the coast of San Francisco. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and quartz crystals turned to sand. The descendants of dolphins have returned to the land and make sand castles with pieces containing data that say we were created in the image of God, complete with beards, an appendix, and no female deity, so in whose image were females created. Oh wait, the end of the world will have come and God in his infinite wisdom nukes all the crystals, Sodom and Gomorrah style, leaving only the King James' edition of the Bible embedded in a fragment in the Garden of Eden.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisway2sec, good reprose but if I may ask which King James are you referring to. Afterall there are two versions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWelcome to politics. Cheers.