Data Crystals - FINALLY!

[137th Gebirg]

People have been playing with this tech for years (I recall this being one of the main driving forces behind the invention of the high-frequency blue laser, involving IBM and a few other big tech firms) but it looks like someone in the UK finally managed to nail this one down:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/tec....html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool&iid=obnetwork

360 Terabytes of persistent, stable and (relatively) lossless data storage - supposedly good for "billions of years". Gone are the days of disc rot, magnetic degaussing and a number of other deleterious factors on storage media. In prototype stages now, but no doubt working towards affordable commercialization in the coming decade. I just hope all my old data CD's and DVD's can last a few years longer until I can get them all off-loaded onto one of these things. There doesn't seem to be much info on re-write-ability, though, so I'm thinking it's probably a one-off deal, much like early CD's used to be, but it didn't take long to change that. Just takes time to develop the tech.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

I wonder how fast the data can be accessed.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Me too. The article was surprisingly lacking in all but the most rudimentary of technical details. There is a link to the original announcement from the University of Southampton, which gives a few more details:

• Thermal stability up to 1000° C and "virtually unlimited" lifespan at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190° C) - this, quite frankly, blows my mind.
  
• The only reference to speed: "The [test] documents were recorded using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre)." No real quantifiable definition of the rather dodgy use of the word "ultrafast", but it does hold some promise on the speed front, at any rate and is hopefully more than just an over-hyped marketing gimmick.

They also say, "Now, major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race." This is a cool concept, but this assumes that a sufficiently advanced-enough technology, either the offspring of surviving non-human (ascended/evolved?) descendants and/or extraterrestrials, would be able to reverse-engineer the storage mechanism and process, as well as the language the content is written in, both in encoded form (binary, hexidecimal or otherwise), and unencoded character set.

Of course they're calling it a "Superman Memory Crystal" because Kal-El is rather in the forefront of popular culture these days, but this feels a lot closer to the smaller and more realistic (IMO) data crystals used in Babylon 5. Although, as the programs and data being stored on them get more complex, like on the Kryptonian level (semi-sentient holographic AI's and whatnot) I guess they could get to be Superman-sized crystals, yeah...

SO hoping this is more than just smoke and mirrors and actually a real, functioning prototype.

 

[Dryson]

Are the crystals able to be configured as a processor? If the crystals can store data for billions of years what would it take to be able to move stored data around in such a manner to create a process? Because of the amount of data able to be stored on the crystals data would be able to be compiled at a faster rate.

Just imagine the resolution of images from space that would be able to be recorded entirely and then investigated bit by bit without losing any data due to having curbing the data to ensure that only what was needed was recorded.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Are you referring to lossless and lossy compression? AFAIK this is purely a storage medium and it doesn't provide any intrinsic processing capability.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Crystals and crystallike storage devices have been all over Sci-Fi for decades.
Superman, Stargate, B5 and even Star Trek with their isolinear chips belong in that category.
The reason, of course, making a bit of colored plastic is a very cheap way of making a bit of alien/futuristic looking tech.
Nice to see life imitating art yet again.

 

[publiusr]

From what I gather it is just super microfiche/microform.

You can't really run anything--but a print out of computer programs no longer takes reams of data.

A physical microscope is all that is needed.

Note the Doctor Who type confession disk looking thingy: http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/

You start off with something easily visible, then shrink it down as a spiral to let the reader know what is going on.