Scientists invent entirely new kind of storage – and it could change the course of humanity

Scientists have invented a new kind of storage – and suggest that it could change the course of human history.

The storage uses laser-modified glass to encode information. And that information could last for more than 10,000 years, they say.

The world is generating far more information than it ever has. But storing that information has proven difficult: the hard disks inside of our computer, for instance, degrade relatively quickly, leading to fears that the vast amount of information we are generating could be lost one day soon.

Researchers have suggested in the past that storing that information in glass could be a helpful way of keeping it around for civilisation in the future. But it has so far proven impossible to actually write or retrieve that data.

Now, scientists from Microsoft working on a team called Project Silica say they have found a way to do that, using a special laser. The laser is able to encode three-dimensional pixels called voxels into glass, and use that to store information.

In one 12-square-centimetre, 2-millimetre-deep piece of glass, it can store 4.84 terabytes of data. That is roughly equivalent to two million books, or 5,000 films in 4K.

Experiments suggest that it could last up to 10,000 years stored at 290 degrees Celsius. That might mean that it lasts even longer at room temperature, they say.

But they note that it could be damaged by mechanical stress or corroded with chemicals, which would degrade the material and the data stored on it.

Scientists away from the research suggested that the discovery could change the course of humanity in a similar way to previous storage techniques.

“If implemented at scale, [Silica] could represent a milestone in the history of knowledge storage, akin to oracle bones, medieval parchment or the modern hard drive,” wrote researchers Feng Chen and Bo Wu in an accompanying article. “One day, a single piece of glass might carry the torch of human culture and knowledge across millennia.”

The work is reported in a new paper, ‘Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage’, published in the journal Nature.