Posted on 06/03/2009 11:44:36 PM PDT by neverdem
Never forget. Microscopic iron crystals moving within carbon nanotubes could hold computer data permanently.
Credit: Zettl Research Group/LBNL/UC Berkeley
That embarrassing home movie of you naked in the tub could still be around millions of years from now, along with your less-than-eloquent posts on Facebook and Twitter. Researchers have developed a new technology based on carbon nanotubes that promises to permanently preserve individual bits of data, such as those found on computer hard drives and DVDs. If so, the technology could lead to data archives holding the entirety of human thought and communications potentially forever.
As our technological society has progressed, storing and retrieving data has actually grown more difficult. One notable example is the Domesday Book, a record of English settlements compiled by William the Conqueror in 1085. The document survives in a secure, environmentally controlled facility, but a digitized version produced in 1986 lasted only 20 years: Magnetic patterns embedded in the computer disk degraded steadily over time. Likewise, home movies shot on Kodachrome film have preserved family memories for more than 60 years, whereas videotapes can deteriorate in less than a decade. And some DVDs have shown signs of image loss even more quickly, because their plastic and glue layers have turned out to be relatively fragile and are vulnerable to sunlight exposure and mishandling--a phenomenon called DVD rot.
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Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley
Seeking something more permanent, a team of physicists and materials scientists has looked to the nanoscale. Reporting this month in Nano Letters, the group describes a technique of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted into the tubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a "1" or a "0" in the binary language of computers. "Nothing could be easier, electronically speaking," says physicist and co-author Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley.
Zettl says the technology will require further tests, but results from both lab experiments and theoretical models show with "high confidence" that the device can retain data indefinitely. He says commercialization of the device--which would probably look something like a flash drive--will be challenging, "going up against a mature electronics memory industry." But given the potential impact, he says, the incentives are high.
Materials engineer Mark Spearing of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom calls the study "well conducted" and the technology "ingenious." Nothing is permanent, though, he says. Such a device could fail for any number of reasons, says Spearing, some of which may be currently unknown.
bump
Not to mention that over a billion years evolution will have occurred to such an extent that our descendants will have evolved into beings that do not resemble us in the slightest. Our thoughts will seem as sophisticated to them as the thoughts of squirrels seem to us.
INDEED.
Microslop will find a way to make it corrosively destructive and very inescapably costly otherwise.
That's too simple. Just put the information into any undocumented, proprietary Microsoft file formats, and you can be pretty much guaranteed to lose most of your data as they force you to migrate to newer undocumented formats.
Well, I feel ten feet tall now. ;’)
Thanks neverdem.
I CAN HAZ IMMORTALITY?
Unless we forget the encoding scheme or stop building the hardware to read it in, oh, say 30 years.
Going to have to prepend universally-readable instructions on the file format and any codecs used. Saying “install this codec on Windows” is not going to work.
Now how to attach billion-year instructions telling them how to interface with the disk is another question.
People recently had problems getting images off of tapes from the mid 60s of lunar surveys. They had to dig up about the only remaining example of a tape reader and fix it up to read the tapes.
“”Nothing is permanent, though, he says. Such a device could fail for any number of reasons, says Spearing, some of which may be currently unknown.””
A strong magnet.
Look around, what makes you think we are evolving towards increased intellegence?
Thanks.
Seriously, do we need to store porn that long.
Do I understand correctly; you do not like Western Digital hd’s? I have several externals. What brand do you prefer? And why?
I used to work for the Ohio BWC. My department maintained about 4000 systems with WD HDs, and we ended up replacing almost 1/4 of them due to failure, click of death, ect.
That was back when a 200Mb HD was considered big, but I haven't had much use for Western Digital since then.
Until recently, Seagate gave a 5 year warranty. Now you gotta buy their more expensive drives for the 5 year, and most are 3 year, but they still blow the competition out of the water, and last a long time.
I agree with you here. There is a crying need for ENORMOUS size record storehouses that will archive the scientific data that we are gathering daily right now. Terabytes of photos and data from the Hubble Telescope and other space observations really ought to be archived forever, so we are able to more closely examine historical records of specific stars or galaxies or sections of the sky when something is noticed (supernova, comets, etc.). All the “basic science” data such as terabytes of data the world’s particle accelerators create daily should similarly be archived be available for continuing access. Weather/climate data are similarly voluminous, however in that case the value is much lower due to the measurement uncertainties. Of course, we would love to maintain such things as the classics of literature, motion pictures, etc., but that is small potatoes in the data industry compared to the importance of maintaining the other records I mentioned.
If this technology proves to be realizable and truly as permanent as it now seems, it would be a godsend to these and many other scientific endeavors. I would guess that such a capability would be worth over ten times the cost of current data retention techniques.
Nice to see your comments AFPhys. Haven’t seen you around much of late.
Yes, the permanent nature of this type of large storage would be a real Godsend.
Do you ever ponder the storage of all this data on an archival device though, and what it might be like if it were found in say 3,000 years?
English might not be known at that point in time. Things like the electrical supply, the language, the fundamental understanding of the computer, the data itself, it might be tough for them to fully access and understand what they had in their hands.
You’d probably need to leave a Rosetta stone type of decoder, or perhaps even an English primer, and then directions.
It certainly wouldn’t be as easy as just saving the data and hoping someone could access it later. There would have to be a fairly sophisticated plan to make sure access was possible at that point.
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