Glass disks for storing information

There has always been a problem storing information on different sticks or other external memories. They all had a problem. Now the future brings us something revolutionary that promises to store information for our great-grandchildren.

Glass disks bring us 5D technology, that is, the 5th dimension, the new way to store information in an extremely small space. The smaller and more robust the devices on which we store information, the longer they will be able to withstand a very long period of time, far exceeding the human life cycle.

After all, isn’t that what we want? That the things we do, we say, we create, and we feel them persist far beyond us?

If everything remained as it is now, with hard drives full of errors, uncomfortable CDs, all the information we have today would soon degrade.

What if we thought of a new way to conceptualize information? What if the information could be recorded not only in three-dimensional spaces, but could it be read according to criteria that we find incredible today? For example, what if some lasers could read the information based on the interaction of light with a glass surface?

Researchers at the University of Southampton had the idea of devising “supports of the future” for storing digital information.

In 2013, they created a piece of transparent glass that stores the information so compactly that it retains 3,000 times more data than an ordinary CD, reports journalists at Futurism.

Moreover, according to scientists, its life span would be about 13 billion years, that is, three times more than the current age of Planet Earth, and it could cope with temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius.

As a comparison, a glass disk the size of a Blue Ray that can now store 128 MB would store 360 TB of data. In current technologies, such storage space would require an external hard drive of about 150 centimeters.

The structure on which the “CDs of the future” are built is one on three levels-X, Y and Z, all decoded by the method called “nanoreading”.

The points on the surface of the three layers are placed so precisely, each one in a specific position, in such a way that the correlation between the predefined path that determines the occurrence of a specific information.

They will be readable by a special device that is now in testing and is very close to the production stage. Specialists have already begun to store on these disks the first information and copied the Bible, Newton’s “optics” and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The downside, at least for now, is that technology has not yet come cheap enough to be mass-marketed, especially since it is always difficult to make people part of digital revolutions.

As it becomes cheaper and easier to use, however, this method could be a real success around the world.