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Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

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Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#191

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

The 5 dimensions refer to the precise control of 5 degrees of freedom of nanogratings. 3 degrees of position in spatial coordinates and two degrees of polarization aspects. It’s in the paper and not phony, although the word “dimension” might be better replaced with some other word that doesn’t sound like 5 spatial dimensions - which is not what is intended. Before saying something is phony you should probably read the paper(s). That is from one of the top optoelectronics experts in the world.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#192
post #174
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they first chose the result they wanted — age of universe and worked backwards to derive that result. Is it true? Sure, probably. The method flys in the face of the foundations of science and was done for sensationalism. What’s special about 462K? Is it a local min/max? Doesn’t seem so.

They computed, verified and measured wear and tear (lifespan in Gy) as a function of temperature. The paper, which I linked, includes the full plot. They had to pick _some number_ (temp or years) in order to communicate it as one data point. There's nothing special about 462K -- it's what happens when you pick the age of the Universe as how long you want it to last form now. Pick a billion years, or 10 billion, and y…

And finally the disc will never reach that, because it will not physically survive (or it's surroundings) to reach that time.

Not on Earth, not in space, when real considerations like impact resistance are in.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#193
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal...

"The paper isn't a real academic paper and itself also marketeer noise" is one of the options I've outlined as a debate position. But let's be clear: we started by calling research "phony" over something that would've been trivially clarified by reading a short paper. In order to even get to that point, I have to acknowledge that maybe you get to call research "phony" without seriously implying fraud. I have a hard t…

There are actual papers. Press releases and popularizations are not the same thing. If you look you can find the actual papers.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#194
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The paper isn't a real academic paper and itself also marketeer noise" is one of the options I've outlined as a debate position. But let's be clear: we started by calling research "phony" over something that would've been trivially clarified by reading a short paper. In order to even get to that point, I have to acknowledge that maybe you get to call research "phony" without seriously implying fraud. I have a hard t…

There are actual papers. Press releases and popularizations are not the same thing. If you look you can find the actual papers.

It appears you’re agreeing with me? I’m suggesting the confusion would have been alleviated by reading the actual paper.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#195
post #139

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

One of these is now orbiting the Sun for 30 million years in Elon Musk’s Tesla - see www.archmission.org

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#196
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me even more is the precision of time they can keep the data: 13.8 billion years. Not 13.7, not 13.9 - no: they figured out 13.8 exactly. That's fake precision and remarkably close to the current age of the universe...

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up and conveniently landed there! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accu…

Are the error bars on the decay data they're computing from tight enough to justify three significant figures? Three significant figures doesn't seem like very much to me given the precision of modern metrology. Edit: I checked the paper and it looks like in this case the precision is actually ± one order of magnitude, so even one significant figure on the decay lifetime is overstating their precision. They can probably justify 1½ significant figures on the temperature, though.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#197
post #125
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that number is suspiciously close to the age of the Universe. Phony indeed. "WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. In 2013, Planck measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years."

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up and conveniently landed there: they computed a range of options and worked back from that specific number to prove it'd work for as long as we could possibly care. Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted w…

I don't think that's as long as we could possibly care, but it's a good concrete number. The Stelliferous Era is predicted to last some 10¹³ years; looking at their Arrhenius plot, we probably need to keep the temperature below about 400 K to last that long. (However, I suspect that over such long time scales, other decay mechanisms such as cosmic-ray damage will be more important.)

Most likely, for long-term archival, we need to make copies of the data from time to time. But this technique will likely allow those intervals to be longer than the current age of the universe, and it offers higher density than you can get with techniques like Norsam's planar discs, which is a useful improvement over existing media.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#198

Does anyone know a resource which explains the theoretical limit for retrievable, durable, information storage? I would assume the most dense medium possible would be a collection of neutrons, since neutron stars are the most dense object other than a black hole, but retrieving information from them doesn’t seem feasible.

> Does anyone know a resource which explains the theoretical limit for retrievable, durable, information storage?

From an old ZFS weblog post on why they chose 128 bits for their data structures:

> Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10^51 operations per second on at most 10^31 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2^128 blocks = 2^137 bytes = 2^140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2^140 bits) / (10^31 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

* https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-hi...

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#199
post #183
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the Bible could be interpreted as ‘this is one of humanitys most important works so let’s preserve that first’ Yet the majority of people on planet earth are not Christian. I’ll go with the Gutenberg homage though

Way more than that many people couldn't care less about Gutenberg though. Point being the bible is the most read book in the world.

Since Christianity is not the largest religion, I find that claim needs additional proof.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#200

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

@YayamiOmate

I think your emphatic view is somewhat ill-informed. For years it's been theorized that glass-like crystals could store information indefinitely—even well beyond the age of the universe. Here's the reasoning:

1. The oldest crystals known on earth are already some 4.4 billions years old and they are still intact. They are zircon crystals found in various places across the planet but the oldest discovered to date were found in Australia.

2. For all intents and purposes these zircon crystals still contain most of their original encoded information from the time they were formed. The reason we know this is that these crystals have remained essentially intact and structurally undamaged over their lifetime of some 4.4 billion years—by definition, if they'd lost all their information they would no longer be intact crystals.

3. Yes, they will have lost a tiny percentage of their information integrity from the time when they were formed, this data loss would have been the result of small amounts of both internal and external radiation and from external cosmic ray radiation, heat and other environmental effects, nevertheless zircon is a very hardy material and this loss has been minimal.

(Essentially, restating the obvious, as zircon has been shown to keep most of its data intact for at least one third of known length of the universe (13.8/4.4 Gy) then by extension the storage time mentioned in the paper [13.8 Gy] for this glassy crystalline structure is highly feasible).

4. If these 4.4 Gy zircon crystals had originally been encoded in ways that allowed lossless data recovery such as Reed-Solomon encoding as used in CDs and DVDs to recover data then today we would be able to recover ALL of the original information from 4.4 Gy ago.

5. We know that under ideal conditions some crystals such as zircon and others have lives of much longer than 4.4 Gy. Why? Well crystal structures are known to be the most stable forms of matter in the universe that goes with the fact that they have the lowest entropy: https://www.livescience.com/50942-third-law-thermodynamics.h... — to quote: “The entropy of a perfect crystal is zero when the temperature of the crystal is equal to absolute zero (0 K).”

6. Theoretically, a perfect crystal with zero entropy in an ideal environment would keep its information for eternity—which is much longer than the age of the universe. Now, as we know zircon and its data/structural information can exist almost intact for at least 4.4 Gy and that a perfect crystal kept under ideal conditions will do so for ever, logic dictates that we cannot rule out that crystals cannot last the age of the universe which is ≈13.8 Gy.

7. That said however, making crystals that last the age of the universe is one thing but keeping them sufficiently intact to be able to recover all their data after this length of time is another matter altogether. To do so—as mentioned—we would have to encode the crystals with a data recovery algorithm and ensure that they were safe from cosmic radiation etc. (Even with hardy crystals such as zircon we may have to send them to a part of the universe that's very low in ambient cosmic radiation (but we'd have plenty of time to do so given their intrinsically long and hardy life).)

8. The ultimate life of encoded data in near-perfect crystals would be the product of the universe's environment and the degree of how perfect the crystal was (how close to zero its entropy was). A similar problem arises with ancient DNA, no matter how well DNA may me stored against damage it ultimately will succumb to damage from cosmic radiation which on current estimates is about 1 to 2 million years [right, Jurassic Park is not possible by resurrecting DNA at least]. Keep in mind however that zircon-like crystals are millions of times more hardy and resilient than is DNA.

9. As I said, the concept of storing data in stable crystal structures is not new. Seeing the crystal/glass-like photo in this article I cannot help be reminded of the remarkable similarity between it and HAL's crystal-like memory in Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 classic science fiction film '2001: A Space Odyssey'. I'm pretty certain, one way or other, crystal data storage of this type will be the norm before long.

10. Oh, BTW, for those who might worry about the concept of 5D not making much sense, I can assure you it's pretty common these days, it even extends down to what's called 5-axis machine tools: http://www.5-axis.org/

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