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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)

#221

Post by notacoward »

kragen wrote: post #209
notacoward wrote: post #112

There's a long and mostly bad history of claims around 3D storage. About twenty years ago I followed a company called Constellation 3D, later Terastor. They made many strikingly similar claims, smaller absolute numbers but a similar multiplier vs. what was already in the market. At least they only claimed three dimensions. I can sort of accept orientation as an effective fourth dimension, but size seems like a real s…

According to the paper, their laser pulse rate is 500kHz; if they're writing a single 1 bit per pulse, and half the bits are 1 bits, and there's no coding overhead from something like 8b/10b, that's 125 kilobytes per second, so 10 seconds per 1.2 megabyte 5¼" DSHD floppy. At this rate, filling the 360-terabit capacity of the disc would take 11 years. You would not expect such a slow storage system to be able to compe…

Strawman. I never said there was anything wrong or untrue about the claims in the paper. I'm just trying to put that into perspective. You're not new to HN. You must know that people here mostly see "360TB super-durable media" and immediately jump to thinking about how they'll put their private copy of the npm repository on it tomorrow. Or their transient ML training data. Or their porn stash. Pretending perspective is irrelevant so you can score some internet points is - to borrow your own phrase - childish.

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

#222

Post by kragen »

notacoward wrote: post #220
kragen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't launch it into space, it will be destroyed when the sun engulfs the earth in only six billion years, if not earlier. There's a dismayingly large chance that the only thing surviving from our entire culture in only a few million years will be a mass extinction in the fossil record, a halo of geosynchronous metal debris, and whatever data is encoded in such stable forms as these glass discs. In that contex…

I know it's fun to call people short-sighted and compare them to children, but grow up yourself. Sending something in this particular medium was a publicity stunt, and it worked. You think we're talking about it here for any other reason than Elon Musk was (tangentially) involved? Sending some sort of beacon or memorial into space is such a great idea we've done it many times before, with better-tested media. If we w…

The Rosetta Project disks have a much shorter expected lifespan and weigh more, so they're less practical.

Since I've been talking about the Rosetta Project and related initiatives for about 15 years, long before Elon Musk was involved, you're also mistaken to assert that "we're [not] talking about it here for any other reason." I mean, I'll take your word that it's true of you, but it's not true of me. Maybe you've got a mouse in your pocket?

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

#223

Post by notacoward »

kragen wrote: post #222
notacoward wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's fun to call people short-sighted and compare them to children, but grow up yourself. Sending something in this particular medium was a publicity stunt, and it worked. You think we're talking about it here for any other reason than Elon Musk was (tangentially) involved? Sending some sort of beacon or memorial into space is such a great idea we've done it many times before, with better-tested media. If we w…

The Rosetta Project disks have a much shorter expected lifespan and weigh more, so they're less practical. Since I've been talking about the Rosetta Project and related initiatives for about 15 years, long before Elon Musk was involved, you're also mistaken to assert that "we're [not] talking about it here for any other reason." I mean, I'll take your word that it's true of you, but it's not true of me. Maybe you've…

> shorter expected lifespan

Shorter claimed. FTFY.

> Maybe you've got a mouse in your pocket?

By "we" I meant not just two people but the dozens who have commented here. But you knew that. Let me know when you want to have a discussion instead of merely trolling.

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

#224

Post by hilbert42 »

simonh wrote: post #30
fredsted wrote: post #2

What happens at 13.9B years?

I'm guessing that's the estimated time it would take for entropy in the material to render the data unreadable. They specify at room temperature, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about entropic disruption of the structure due to thermal effects. Note that 'glass' is a hugely varied class of materials, so without knowing much more we can't make spot judgements about the validity of the claim.

"Note that 'glass' is a hugely varied class of materials, so without knowing much more we can't make spot judgements about the validity of the claim."

As I say in part of my post the key issue here is the intrinsic property of this "glass" which will be of a crystalline-like nature, to quote:

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).”

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

#225

Post by kragen »

notacoward wrote: post #221
kragen wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the paper, their laser pulse rate is 500kHz; if they're writing a single 1 bit per pulse, and half the bits are 1 bits, and there's no coding overhead from something like 8b/10b, that's 125 kilobytes per second, so 10 seconds per 1.2 megabyte 5¼" DSHD floppy. At this rate, filling the 360-terabit capacity of the disc would take 11 years. You would not expect such a slow storage system to be able to compe…

Strawman. I never said there was anything wrong or untrue about the claims in the paper. I'm just trying to put that into perspective. You're not new to HN. You must know that people here mostly see "360TB super-durable media" and immediately jump to thinking about how they'll put their private copy of the npm repository on it tomorrow. Or their transient ML training data. Or their porn stash. Pretending perspective…

You said, "There's a long and mostly bad history of claims…" which I interpreted — I think reasonably — as asserting that these past claims were false. (In what other sense can a claim be bad?) I was rebutting that reasonable interpretation of what you said, not a strawman. I am pleased to see that you are not claiming that the paper is false.

False conclusions hypothetically jumped to by finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers, in JWZ's immortal phrase, are not my problem. Mere assertion that their perspectives are relevant does not constitute an argument for their relevance. In fact, nobody in this thread has so far suggested storing their replica of the npm archive, their ML training data, or their porn collection on one of these discs, so your concern seems to be entirely without an empirical foundation.

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

#226

Post by SoylentOrange »

kragen wrote: post #216
SoylentOrange wrote: post #100

I have a question for anyone here who understands how this works: is the glass from the article resilient to physical shocks like falling/shaking/heat/other mechanical stress? Documents that are meant to last a long time used to be written on vellum because it is a very physically durable material. I understand that this glass method beats existing digital storage methods for resilience, but does it best traditional…

Yes, fused quartz has roughly the mechanical durability of granite, and it doesn't melt until a considerably higher temperature than ordinary glass (though lower than the 1650° temperature at which crystalline quartz melts). Vellum and other leathers have a lifespan of under 10000 years under ideal conditions, like those under which Ötzi was preserved. Under such conditions, the researchers extrapolate from accelerat…

Thanks for the answer. Can the durability of the fused quartz be compared to the durability of this storage format though?

(from a more detailed article [1])

> The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

Is the idea that these nanostructures are themselves hyper-resilient? Or would a significant impact alter them so as to render them unreadable?

[1]: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-u...

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

#227

Post by cannabis_sam »

YayamiOmate wrote: post #18

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…

This account is amazing! Every reply I looked at is a classic middlebrow dismissal (in the sense of pg’s essay)

Thanks to lvh, who pushed me to actually look at the paper.

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

#228

Post by Robotbeat »

notacoward wrote: post #220
kragen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't launch it into space, it will be destroyed when the sun engulfs the earth in only six billion years, if not earlier. There's a dismayingly large chance that the only thing surviving from our entire culture in only a few million years will be a mass extinction in the fossil record, a halo of geosynchronous metal debris, and whatever data is encoded in such stable forms as these glass discs. In that contex…

I know it's fun to call people short-sighted and compare them to children, but grow up yourself. Sending something in this particular medium was a publicity stunt, and it worked. You think we're talking about it here for any other reason than Elon Musk was (tangentially) involved? Sending some sort of beacon or memorial into space is such a great idea we've done it many times before, with better-tested media. If we w…

Publicity stunt by whom? The whole point of the Arch Mission is stuff like this: https://www.archmission.org/

Using this exact media was a full test of the technology, to get it out of the lab and into the environment they intend for it long-term.

But I can see you're committed to this narrative, so please don't let me interrupt it with the actual organization responsible for it.

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

#229

Post by kragen »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #226
kragen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, fused quartz has roughly the mechanical durability of granite, and it doesn't melt until a considerably higher temperature than ordinary glass (though lower than the 1650° temperature at which crystalline quartz melts). Vellum and other leathers have a lifespan of under 10000 years under ideal conditions, like those under which Ötzi was preserved. Under such conditions, the researchers extrapolate from accelerat…

Thanks for the answer. Can the durability of the fused quartz be compared to the durability of this storage format though? (from a more detailed article [1]) > The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures. Is the idea that these nanostructures are themselves hyper-resilient? Or would a significant impact alter t…

Well, there are a couple of different questions here. One is about resilience to physical shocks such as falling and mechanical stress, which could destroy the disc but won't do anything to the nanogratings. The other is about gradual, continuous decay processes — over a sufficiently long period of time, random thermal fluctuations will destroy any solid object, and analogous but larger-scale relaxation processes will destroy galaxies as well. Such processes could cause the nanogratings to decay long before the fused quartz itself evaporates.

The nanogratings do have a certain amount of built-in redundancy; they're holographic phenomena.

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

#230

Post by notacoward »

kragen wrote: post #225
notacoward wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. I never said there was anything wrong or untrue about the claims in the paper. I'm just trying to put that into perspective. You're not new to HN. You must know that people here mostly see "360TB super-durable media" and immediately jump to thinking about how they'll put their private copy of the npm repository on it tomorrow. Or their transient ML training data. Or their porn stash. Pretending perspective…

You said, "There's a long and mostly bad history of claims…" which I interpreted — I think reasonably — as asserting that these past claims were false . (In what other sense can a claim be bad ?) I was rebutting that reasonable interpretation of what you said, not a strawman. I am pleased to see that you are not claiming that the paper is false. False conclusions hypothetically jumped to by finance-obsessed man-child…

> Mere assertion that their perspectives are relevant

Is it your reading comprehension that's lacking, or just your integrity? I said perspective is relevant. I didn't say their perspective.

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