Ah, Arthur C Clarke "half baked ideas"
over 30 years ago, I vaguely imagined a crystalline lattice that could be addressed by laser to act as main storage. TBH, I'm surprised it took so long ....
Boffins' 5D laser-based storage tech could keep terabytes forever
Boffins in the UK’s Southampton University have devised a five-dimensional storage scheme using glass, femtolasers and a lifespan of billions of years, so they say. Researchers, led by Martynas Beresna, in the university’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have built five-dimensional photonic structures in nano-structured …
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 13:07 GMT JimmyPage
Re:1974 film Zardoz
not that I am aware of.
The ACC half baked ideas reference is from an interview I read with him, where he commented he had floated so many ideas in fiction or speculation that had become reality.
The most famous idea being the geosynchronous communications satellite.
In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 14:20 GMT Charles 9
Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz
"In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO."
At least that idea has a concrete status: Not Possible YET. We've already got a pretty decent idea of the physical characteristics needed to pull it off. We just haven't found or invented a material able to tick all the marks yet.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 19:14 GMT cosmogoblin
Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz
If you want to get technical (and who here doesn't?) you can't reduce the energy required to get into LEO, which is about 30 MJ / kg.
What you can reduce is the amount of energy wasted in doing so. By using more efficient technology, we can get closer to that 30 MJ / kg. Right now, I think our tech is about 0.1% efficient...
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Thursday 18th February 2016 18:33 GMT mosw
Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz
" you can't reduce the energy required to get into LEO"
With an elevator you could harvest energy when you bring mass down from orbit to partially offset the energy needed to lift mass up. So the net energy cost to orbit would go down. If you are mining raw materials in space you may even get a net energy surplus from the elevator.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is even a theoretical material strong enough to make such an elevator.
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Friday 19th February 2016 09:30 GMT Charles 9
Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz
"Unfortunately, I don't think there is even a theoretical material strong enough to make such an elevator."
But given how old the idea is, you would think someone would've put the concept to bed at this point by mathematically proving that a material capable of being the cable for a space elevator cannot physically exist due to exceeding physical limits on material strength or whatever. The fact we haven't seen such a proof indicates it's still possible but we haven't come up with the right combination of materials.
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Saturday 20th February 2016 06:05 GMT David Pollard
Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz
Gravitational energy of something at the Earth's surface, 30 MJ/kg, is of the same order of magnitude as the calorific value of carbohydrates. Is this just coincidence or a subtle reflection of the anthropogenic principle? Is the Earth just the right sort of size for organic life?
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 14:32 GMT Peter2
Re: Seriously long-term storage
It's only been 70,000 years since we climed out of trees. Arabic numerals have existed for only 1500 years. English is virtually unrecognisable beyond 500 years ago, and Roman type characters have existed for maybe 3000 years.
In 13.8 billion (13,800,000,000) years, it's a pretty certain bet that the entities reading data from such long term storage will not only not understand the file formats, but won't understand our language and it is perhaps unlikely that they will recognise even the concepts our language is based on. (Just look at how different English is from Latin after a couple of thousand years!)
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 16:35 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Seriously long-term storage
Liste, dude.
Self-describing formats are no mystery any longer.
Concepts of language don't change that much - pace all the linguistic's oohing and aaahing it's just activations in slightly incompatible semantic networks.
Just add a proper primer and get on with it.
Actually, you could add a dump of Watson (or whatever comes next) to it while you are at it and indicate how to run it (add machine schematics for implementation) to help the future reader along.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 18:41 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: Seriously long-term storage
In 13.8 billion (13,800,000,000) years, it's a pretty certain bet that the entities reading data from such long term storage will not only not understand the file formats, but won't understand our language
Perhaps it would be better to opt for something more akin to HD-Rosetta as analog information may be encoded along side digital. Alas, it is estimated to last a paltry 10,000 years as a storage medium, but a similar approach in different media might be worth considering.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 12:40 GMT tirk
Eternity? Exaggeration surely!
I doubt they'll survive the Big Rip!
(Where is the dark energy icon??)
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 13:00 GMT Evil Auditor
Our legacy, our duty
...the prospect of a lifespan in billions of years for storage...
Finally we can save tons of cats' videos and -not to forget- porn for the pleasure of our descendants in a so far future that they won't know cats as we do. And our today's will be considered ancient alien porn. Wow!
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 20:32 GMT Fun Fun
Re: Glass is a super cooled liquid...
Medieval glass windows are thicker at the lower end for a particular reason.
As the glass is thicker at the lower end it acts a little bit like a prism; it changes the angle of the incoming ray of the sun in such a way that the ray of light can reach farther inside the church.
Illumination is the reason. 8/
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 14:31 GMT Charles 9
Note they also said a specific temperature, so I imagine they physically measured the degree of deformation the substrate experienced during their experiment and extrapolated a point at which the data is too degraded to recover. IOW, it's a number to perhaps take with a pinch of salt but at least they can explain how they came up with it. Plus note the temperature was actually quite high (close to 500K) and nowhere near standard temperature or your average room temperature. As noted, glass is actually extremely stable as long as you don't get it up near the melting point (in fact that why glass is rather brittle--it has no "give").
PS. We've been hearing about holographic crystalline data storage for decades now (add Babylon 5 to the Sci-Fi worlds that make use of it in their fiction), but we've yet to see them actually get out of the lab. The end of the article, though, hopefully paints a different picture. Let's hope we can actually get our hands on this for an archival medium in the near future.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 22:32 GMT John Brown (no body)
"PS. We've been hearing about holographic crystalline data storage for decades now (add Babylon 5 to the Sci-Fi worlds that make use of it in their fiction), but we've yet to see them actually get out of the lab."
Didn't IBM come up with some form of crystalline 3D storage some years ago? Maybe it's still 50 years away.
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Monday 22nd February 2016 09:58 GMT almadenmike
Yep. IBM's holographic data storage research had some significant technical successes, but interest declined after it became pretty clear that it would not compete with the improving price/performance of existing storage technologies. Here's a link to an article that sums up many of the challenges: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/whatever-happened-to-holographic-storage-1099304
Still, I enjoyed producing informative articles and dramatic photos, such as this one -- http://vig.extremetech.com/media/images/16655.jpg -- for IBM's research news reports.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 17:41 GMT PleebSmasher
Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-5d-optical-memory-glass-evidence.html
http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/5dopticalstore.html
http://www.cnet.com/news/a-360tb-disc-that-holds-data-for-more-than-1-million-years/
http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Storage_by_Ultrafast_Laser_Nanostructuring_in_Glass.pdf
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 17:51 GMT PleebSmasher
Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013
"The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference" is actually called "SPIE Photonics West 2016" AFAICT.
Still trying to vet details in this story, still trying to understand why this is newsworthy when the 360 TB/optical disk @ billions of years claims were made in mid-2013.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 18:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013
Took this to be an update in light of the forthcoming presentation.
No?
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 17:59 GMT PleebSmasher
Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013
http://www.spie.org/Documents/ConferencesExhibitions/PW16%20LASE%20Abstracts%20lr.pdf
Conference 9736: Laser-based Micro- and Nanoprocessing X
9736-29, Session 7
Eternal 5D data storage by ultrafast laser
writing in glass (Invited Paper)
Peter G. Kazansky, Martynas Beresna, Jingyu Zhang, Rokas Drevinskas, Aabid Patel, Au?ra Cerkauskaite, Optoelectronics Research Ctr. (United Kingdom)
Femtosecond laser writing in transparent materials has attracted considerable interest due to new science and a wide range of applications from laser surgery, 3D integrated optics and optofluidics to geometrical phase optics and ultra-stable optical data storage. A decade ago it has been discovered that under certain irradiation conditions self-organized subwavelength structures with record small features of 20 nm, could be created in the volume of silica glass. On the macroscopic scale the selfassembled nanostructure behaves as a uniaxial optical crystal with negative birefringence. The optical anisotropy, which results from the alignment of nano-platelets, referred to as form birefringence, is of the same order of magnitude as positive birefringence in crystalline quartz. The two independent parameters describing birefringence, the slow axis orientation (4th dimension) and the strength of retardance (5th dimension), are explored for the optical encoding of information in addition to three spatial coordinates. The slow axis orientation and the retardance are independently manipulated by the polarization and intensity of the femtosecond laser beam. The data optically encoded into five dimensions is successfully retrieved by quantitative birefringence measurements. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including hundreds of terabytes per disc data capacity and thermal stability up to 1000°. Even at elevated temperatures of 160oC, the extrapolated decay time of nanogratings is comparable with the age of the Universe - 13.8 billion years. The demonstrated recording of the digital documents, which will survive the human race, including the eternal copies of Kings James Bible and Magna Carta, is a vital step towards an eternal archive.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 18:59 GMT John Savard
Safety Margin
If the data can survive for 13.8 billion years, the fact that no one will be around to care is not the problem.
It just means the data is more likely to be there in, say, ten years, when I just might want to read it again. The rest is just gravy.
And, barring disaster, people will still be able to understand English, say, 1,000 years from now, which is longer than most contemporary storage media would hold up.
Plus, 360 terabytes on something the size of a Compact Disc! Finally, backing up your hard drive will be practical again, which will give those ransomware peddlers a good kick!
So I certainly hope those folks in Lithuania manage to productize this exciting technology.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 23:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Safety Margin
You would need a lot of hard drives and SSDs at home to fill up one 360 TB 5D laserdisc. You could download every song and movie every made and not come close to filling that up. So I wonder what exactly you'd be storing there to fill it up.
Yeah yeah multiple backups but hopefully even home backup software does deduplication now? Or if it doesn't I'm sure they're readying that feature for release. Most people could probably store every election file they collect in a daily "full" backup and not fill up 360 TB in their lifetime.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 00:35 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Safety Margin
Well, the LHC generates about 30 petabytes of data a year, and that's just one data generator running in academia. (Biggest? I dunno.)
We're still sifting through space mission data from the seventies, some of which has actually been lost due to changing storage formats and media deterioration.
I expect exponentially more science data to be generated in future endeavors, so a medium that could theoretically last "forever" for all intents and purposes to be a good thing for science.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 05:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Safety Margin
Since the guy I was replying to said "backing up your hard drive" I thought it was obvious my reply was in the sense of the needs of people in the home.
Obviously outside that world you can get tons of data, and I imagine compared to the NSA the LHC's 30 PB/yr is puny. I suppose if everyone started wearing a Google Glass type thing that was recording their whole life in high quality 4K video 24x7x365 you could easily see the need for a hundred TB of year of personal storage. I hope if that world ever comes I'm already dead!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
