Will it work on the trinitite created by a nuclear apocalypse?
Asking for a friend.
Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here
There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two, is less clear. The good bits first, and they are truly good. Project Silica is a Microsoft research effort into data …
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Monday 2nd March 2026 10:39 GMT Doctor Syntax
"There's also the market flaw that once you've sold one 10,000-year storage solution, it'll be a while before anyone needs another."
In fact you do need another. You need one to replace the first that died of old age. You need one to interface to USB-D or whatever comes along in the next generation of computers to replace the interface you're currently using. And if that doesn't happen your borosilicate plate with all the world's knowledge on it, being only 2mm thick, isn't even useable as a dinner plate.
The great new BBC Domesday book of 40 years ago became unreadable in very short order without some scrambling about to find a surviving reader. The original from 940 years ago is still readable as in needs nothing more than the Mk 1 eyeball (backed up by a knowledge of palaeography and medieval Latin usages).
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Monday 2nd March 2026 10:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Too much
There's too much data in the world to store on these (expensive and cumbersome) silicate discs. The problem isn't how to store it, but what to store. The internet currently generates many petabytes of data PER DAY.
I believe that, just like in antiquity, most data and knowledge will be lost over time. The only valid time capsules are books, printed on durable paper.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 12:04 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Glass itself is a…
I have been led to believe is a "supercooled liquid."
I don't know whether borosilicate glass is a crystalline solid or is also a supercooled liquid.
Like all fluids window glass does flow in response to gravity — very old glazing (say 100 years) is apparently thicker at the bottom than at the top.
Whether this new storage medium would also distort over hundreds of years to the point of being unreadable is a question worth asking.
Sobering to think that records made on vellum with oakgall ink have survived for around a millenium.
I suppose all the newly redundant IT professionals might be recruited as scribes into 21st century scriptoria in order to preserve our "priceless" knowledge. The supply of vellum and for that matter, oakgall might be problematic. I suppose we might as well go the whole hog and mandate goose feather quills.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 12:54 GMT Aladdin Sane
Re: Glass itself is a…
Glass is officially classified by scientists as an amorphous solid, not a liquid. While formed by cooling a liquid fast enough to avoid crystallization (making it a supercooled liquid during the cooling process), it becomes a rigid, disordered solid at room temperature. The "liquid" flow myth is incorrect.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 13:59 GMT AVR
Re: Glass itself is a…
Old glass windows are thicker at the bottom because they were installed that way - if the glass has varying thickness due to your manufacturing process, putting it in thick end down is more stable than the reverse. Glass is like a liquid, but it isn't one and won't actually flow at all.
Oak gall ink which burns into the vellum is pretty stable when used sparingly, but there's a lot more such writing which has actually burned through the vellum over the centuries turning it into a strange form of lacework. And still more which was lost to time some other way - damp, fire, insects, chucked out, being repurposed to some other use...assuming that these plates will be preserved forever by descendants waiting on our every word is a strange sort of arrogance.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 22:47 GMT DS999
Instead of pursuing 10,000 year storage on physical media
We should encode data in the equivalent of "internet legends" or "old wives tales". Those seem capable of surviving for long periods of time completely unchanged despite outsized influences, as the fact that the "old windows are proof that glass flows" which I first saw on the internet in the early 90s on Usenet seem to be immune to any amount of fact checking will probably exist in the human race as long as there are glass windows.
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Monday 2nd March 2026 14:55 GMT Filippo
On that time scale, it's unlikely that media degradation is the thing that gets your data. I would argue that if you are serious about storing data on that time scale, media degradation is the least of your concerns, because you'll have multiple backups anyway, periodically running checks against each other and fixing any errors that appear. And even setting up that will not really be the main problem.
You'd need to keep your backups in multiple nations, have some kind of organization that can transcode them as data formats change, shift them around as nations destabilize over history, have nearly-unbreakable financial support for it... basically, you need a religion.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
