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A billion years of storage. A terabyte per square inch.
Occulus
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New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years
Scientists are reporting an advance toward a memory device capable of storing data for more than one billion years. (Credit: The American Chemical Society)
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) — Packing more digital images, music, and other data onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more strawberries into the same size supermarket carton. The denser you pack, the quicker it spoils. The 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today's memory cards has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. And the electronics industry needs much greater data densities for tomorrow's iPods, smart phones, and other devices.
Scientists are reporting an advance toward remedying this situation with a new computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years. Their discovery is scheduled for publication in the June 10 issue of the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, a monthly journal.
More here.
This is an astonishing advance.
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This, so fucking hard. I mean, if it turns out to be real then that's fucking awesome, but that's a pretty big goddamn pill to swallow. Where do they come up with the figure one billion years? That's probably longer than the human race will exist, are they sure they know what they're talking about or are they pulling numbers out of their asses?
Say, about 999 million years after we were gone. Optimistically. We'll see how it goes....or won't we?
Good thing we have the BILLION year old computer hardware and power source to read the memory!
How's 8 track tapes doing? Casettes?
Making electronic storage last for a gajillion years is not useful.
I am much more interested in the continuing transition of data from one format to another as this would keep up with the times and always be available.
That problem was solved years ago.
admit it, if it was white and had an apple logo on it, you'd be loving it already
I want trinary bits.
That won't keep me from waiting.
You've got a long wait ahead of you, I think.
Seriously, though, I'm pretty skeptical about whether this would actually work for a billion years but it's not like that's even necessary. A few hundred to a thousand years of storage would be about all one would need, after all it can't be that hard to swap the data to a new one every millennium.
If that were true for carbon and iron, wouldn't that pose problems for the continuation of carbon-based life forms that use iron in hemoglobin?
Also, the article (for those who were wondering about the billion-years claim) states that the storage could be thermally stable for up to a billion years.
I think the actual use of this storage advance is closer than most here think. After all, we're already seeing nanoparticles being used in everyday products such as sunscreen. Yes, it's a bit of a jump from that to this; however, nanomaterials are being advanced at an almost breakneck speed.
I'd give this between five and ten years to become commercially viable. About all that's missing is an economical manufacturing process- and that really isn't far off when you consider things like this, from 2007:
Carbon nanotubes are already capable of doing some extremely funky things, and as I said, the research is rapidly advancing. I'd put my money on this new form of data storage happening sooner, rather than later.
Did I say, I just love this stuff? Nanomaterials are going to be very important in the near future, and can already do some amazing things....
Thats because too often it doesn't become practical or useful many, many years later. I know they can make plastic substrates for displays to be made on but have we seen it yet? No. I'll even link you the article I read in 1997!!
https://www.llnl.gov/str/Sigmon.html
where the hell are my plastic displays?!?! (joking rage aside)
Yea, I'll believe we can squish a TB into a sq inch when they make working sample for mass production.
No. Living things swap out atoms too much for decay to be a problem. And we don't last that long.
If you mean the source of them running out- radioactive carbon is constantly being produced by bombardment from cosmic rays. That's why carbon-14 dating works.