We can guarantee that we have the ability to store the culture, language and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass for future civilizations or what ever else is Out There.
- Aabid Patel, Ph.D., Optical Physicist, U. K.'s Univ. of Southampton
February 19, 2016 San Francisco, California - A surprising headline appeared in technology news February 16th proclaiming Five-dimensional glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years. Thats the age of this universe! The news came this week from the 2016 Int'l. Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) conference in San Francisco where scientists from the U. K.s University of Southampton reported: We can guarantee that we have the ability to store the culture, language and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass for future civilizations or what ever else is out there.
Their new proposed archival method is called 5-dimensional data storage. The recorded discs are only 1-inch in diameter and information is micron-sized dots stored in nanogratings.
Our DNA molecule is 2.5 nanometers in diameter, so were down in the microscopic dimension where even a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide!
Nanogratings means storing data in the nano interior of the glass discs rather than bumps on the surface like a regular CD. Data is read from a normal CD by shining a laser at a tiny line with bumps on it. Whenever the laser hits a bump, light is reflected back and recorded as a 1. Where there is no bump, thats recorded as a 0. Thats why standard CDs are considered to be only two dimensions of information. Those bumps can be scratched off or damaged in air, heat and humidity.
But this new 5-D approach involves how light is reflected in five different variables such as the orientation of the nanograting; the strength of the photon stream refracted; and the position of the light stream in x, y and z axes. Three extra dimensions of information about the reflected light means much denser storage capacity than current day optical discs. For example, if you compare disc sizes and how much each disc could hold, a 5D disc the size of a 128-gigabyte Blu-ray can store 360 terabytes of information. So the 5D glass disc could store 3,000 times more than the Blu-ray disc!
Glass is also safe up to temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, which is 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists say the only thing holding back commercialization for the general public is the high price of the expensive lasers needed to produce the nanoscale data in the 1-inch glass discs.
The U. K. scientists told reporters, We can encode anything. Were not limited just give us the file and we can print it onto a glass disc.
- Aabid Patel, Ph.D., Optical Physicist, U. K.'s Univ. of Southampton
February 19, 2016 San Francisco, California - A surprising headline appeared in technology news February 16th proclaiming Five-dimensional glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years. Thats the age of this universe! The news came this week from the 2016 Int'l. Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) conference in San Francisco where scientists from the U. K.s University of Southampton reported: We can guarantee that we have the ability to store the culture, language and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass for future civilizations or what ever else is out there.
Their new proposed archival method is called 5-dimensional data storage. The recorded discs are only 1-inch in diameter and information is micron-sized dots stored in nanogratings.
Our DNA molecule is 2.5 nanometers in diameter, so were down in the microscopic dimension where even a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide!
Nanogratings means storing data in the nano interior of the glass discs rather than bumps on the surface like a regular CD. Data is read from a normal CD by shining a laser at a tiny line with bumps on it. Whenever the laser hits a bump, light is reflected back and recorded as a 1. Where there is no bump, thats recorded as a 0. Thats why standard CDs are considered to be only two dimensions of information. Those bumps can be scratched off or damaged in air, heat and humidity.
But this new 5-D approach involves how light is reflected in five different variables such as the orientation of the nanograting; the strength of the photon stream refracted; and the position of the light stream in x, y and z axes. Three extra dimensions of information about the reflected light means much denser storage capacity than current day optical discs. For example, if you compare disc sizes and how much each disc could hold, a 5D disc the size of a 128-gigabyte Blu-ray can store 360 terabytes of information. So the 5D glass disc could store 3,000 times more than the Blu-ray disc!
Glass is also safe up to temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, which is 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists say the only thing holding back commercialization for the general public is the high price of the expensive lasers needed to produce the nanoscale data in the 1-inch glass discs.
The U. K. scientists told reporters, We can encode anything. Were not limited just give us the file and we can print it onto a glass disc.
