The First Immortal Storage Quartz Hard Drive
For all our accomplishments as a species, we've never found a storage medium that can last forever. Tapes, CDs, film ... they all fade with time. Even our hard drives, and our digital history, may eventually fade away. But thankfully, researchers at Southampton University are here with a solution: a quartz hard drive that can last 14 billion years and store 360 terabytes.
Given that that's long, long after the sun will have consumed the Earth, it's possible that the tiny optical disk could outlast humanity, so we might as well put the next Golden Record on it. The tiny discs are etched with a nanoscale laser in a microstructure about five microns tall, with each pulse creating a series of three lasers. By reading the polarized light passing through the discs, the massive treasure trove of data can be revealed.
The university is calling it the "Superman memory crystal." The Large Hadron Collider produces about 30 petabytes of data annually, or about 30,000 terabytes or about 83 of the Superman discs. In addition, the Library of Congress estimates that the entire Internet is 74 terabytes (as of 2009, at least.) Each human's genome is 200 GB of information, give or take a few gigabytes, so with 9 billion people on Earth right now, so that's 1.8 trillion gigabytes or 1.8 million petabytes, which translates to 5,000 of these quarter sized discs.
So a nice big warehouse full of these disks, buried deep underground with all the thermal protection in the world, could be the ultimate time capsule of humanity, if we get to work with the massive task of storing all of the data into a new Library of Alexandria. Regardless, these definitely have a few billion years worth of
advantage over using DNA hard drives.
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