Thousands of years from now, what will remain of our digital era?
The ever-growing vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last decades, let alonemillennia.
However, information written into glass by lasers could allow data to be preserved for more than 10,000 years, Microsoft announced in a study on Wednesday.
Since 2019, Microsoft’s Silica project has been trying to encode data on glass plates, in a throwback to the early days of photography, when negatives were also stored on glass.
The system uses silica glass, a common material that is resistant to changes in temperature, moisture and electromagnetic interference.
These are all problems for energy-hungry data centres, which use fast-degrading hard drives and magnetic tapes that require backing up every few years.
In the journal Nature, Microsoft’s research arm said Silica was the first glass storage technology that had been demonstrated to be reliable for writing, reading and decoding data.
However, experts not involved in the project warned that this new tech still faces numerous challenges.
First, bits of data are turned into symbols, which correspond to three-dimensional pixels called voxels.
A high-powered laser pulse then inscribes these minuscule voxels into square glass plates that are roughly the size of a CD.
Source: Insider Paper
