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FEATURE
Information Tomorrow: A Look at the State of Long-Term Storage and Retrieval
by Dave Haden
Time’s relentless dark waters wash away many things, including information. But forgetting can be a virtue, just as remembering everything can be a sort of curse. For instance, do we really need to read the millions of tax-record cuneiform tablets dug from under the immense crumbling ziggurats of ancient Babylonia? Perhaps it is now worth deciphering these ancient cuneiform tablets, which is something increasingly possible with AI assistance. The Babylonian flood and harvest records alone are a sort of useful climate record. And somewhere we may even find parts of a new epic poem from the dawn of civilization, akin to The Epic of Gilgamesh.
It is perhaps ironic that our best affordable preservation media for information, Millenniata’s original M-Disc writable disks, used much the same form of data storage as the ancient Babylonians who were pressing a stylus into a wet clay tablet and then baking the clay. Only in M-Disc’s case, the disc-writer punched a high-power laser beam into a ceramic layer backed by gold. Independent accelerated-ageing tests suggested a life span of 1,000 years, provided any rotted plastic casing around the ceramic layer is replaced and a reader device can be built in the year 3024. (M-Disc product formulation has changed, starting in 2022 with Verbatim shipping the current VERBAT-IMe-000 type of commercial M-Disc. There has been debate among specialists about the value and longevity of the new type.)
More recently, the German startup Cerabyte built a demo system for its 10,000-year ceramic tape cartridges, wherein zeroes and ones are punched in at the nano scale by high-volume tape reader-writers. Practically, we are still dependent on ceramic technology of the sort that even Mr. Usur—a hypothetical scribe writing on clay tablets in the garden plazas of Babylon—would be able to grasp. |
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PROJECT SILICA
Some have been trying to develop very long-term storage beyond ceramic clay, using glass or crystals. For instance, the Arch Mission Foundation’s Billion Year Archive project uses 5D glass storage, dubbed Superman memory crystals. A specialist laser writes voxels (think small, blocky Minecraft shapes) into nanostructured quartz glass to potentially store around 350TB of data and with a likely lifetime of billions of years. A few years ago, this research became the basis of Microsoft’s Project Silica, which succeeded in speeding up the slow write times. Previously, it had taken a month to write Asimov’s famous Foundation trilogy into a crystal, which was then launched into an orbit around the sun. (Foundation is a classic example of science fiction about planning for the survival of a civilization’s central library over galactic time scales.) But Microsoft succeeded in writing the original Superman movie, and reading it back, in a reasonable amount of time. |
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GLOBAL MUSIC VAULT
In 2022, Microsoft was reportedly working with the Global Music Vault in Norway, storing the world’s important songs in durable glass. Theoretically, such tech would remove the need to continually transfer data to the latest storage format. Its expensive high-power lasers and slow write times mean the method is currently far from commercially viable. But it could provide an immutable and incontrovertible source archive of historical-political content that can guard against, for example, the creation of fakes by advanced AIs or as a vital human knowledge backup for the caverns of a research city on the planet Mars. |
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NANOFICHE
In the end, the Billion Year Archive’s original aims were satisfied by the NanoFiche brand. Nickel foil is fused to glass and then nicked with a laser to form raised letters. The content of Wikipedia could be written in a month. The result is readable micropages of durable text. The first pages can be read by any magnifying glass, then the rest can be read with any 200x optical microscope. The project ended up with a 30-million-page library in a simple format that would satisfy any older librarian’s fondness for durable microfiche. An even simpler version might use reels of paper tape, with similarly micro-nicked or even hole-punched pages. Provided it is reeled and sealed into a fireproof and waterproof glass container, good paper tape should last many years. Again, a standard optical magnifier would serve as the page reader. Actually, this idea might make a good local university project, with students studying information, material sciences, graphic design, and product design all working together for a semester on a real-world, place-based project, while also engaging ordinary people and businesses by asking what local content should be included. |
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HUMAN LIBRARIES
One maturing technology for the near future is the encoding of information into DNA, assuming this could be done safely and that some far-future scientist will notice and “read” it. But it also raises the possibility that each and every human could in time be a walking library of the sum of current human knowledge, able to pass it on to future generations with the greatest of ease. |
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 DAVID HADEN is the former editor of Digital Art Live magazine. He now works with a large, well-known British firm. Haden is the curator of the JURN search tool for open discovery of OA arts and humanities content (jurn.link/jurnsearch). Send your comments about this article to itletters@infotoday.com. |
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