Microsoft and Warner eternalise Superman in quartz glass
With an estimated lifespan of 100 million years, this storage medium could outlive the human race. Thanks to Microsoft and Warner, extraterrestrials of the very distant future can enjoy the original 1978 Superman movie.
Insensitive to chemicals, heat-proof and water-resistant, quartz glass is ideally suited as a data storage medium. It's also resistant to electromagnetic radiation and geomagnetic storm. According to estimates, a quartz-based storage system may last 100 million years.
A number of companies have discovered this – the high-tech Hitachi Group, for instance, developed a 2 x 2 cm and 2 mm thick quartz glass sheet in 2012 that uses four storage layers of laser-etched dots to achieve approximately the same data density per area as a CD. At that time, Hitachi emphasised that additional storage layers could easily be added in the future.
In early 2016, scientists from the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton succeeded in storing a data volume of 360 terabytes onto a coin-sized nanostructured glass memory. The file was written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres. According to publications, quartz is said to be even more stable and offer a lifetime of 13.8 billion years at a temperature of 190°C.
Superman eternalised in glass
Now Microsoft has come up with the same idea and is advertising it together with Warner Bros. They have eternalised the Superman movie in quartz. A quartz-based memory is read-only memory and can only be written on once. Thus, along with its stable properties, it's ideally suited for archiving large amounts of data such as movies. However, Microsoft is a little more cautious when it comes to the life span of the quartz medium and speaks of a durability of over 1,000 years.
The project, which is named «Silica» by Microsoft, works with a 75 x 75 x 2 mm quartz glass. This is written on with the help of a femtosecond laser in the LASIK procedure, which is also used in eye surgery. So-called voxels are lasered into the glass. Voxels are a kind of 3D pixel – every voxel is unique. The data is read by machine learning algorithms, which decode the patterns of the voxels. According to Microsoft, up to 100 layers of voxels fit on a piece of quartz that's 2 mm thick. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not reveal how large the amount of data in the Silica memory is.
Whether and at which point the first quartz glass storage media will be available for purchase remains to be seen. What’s for sure is that, despite the progress made by Microsoft, the technology is still in its infancy.
I find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
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