In society to uphold our stories , we used to carve and paint rudimentary images and basic textbook into stone tablets and onto the walls of caves . Nowadays , any of us can store 100 of thousands of documents onto a cheap , thumb - sized USB , preserving them for ten . Scientists at the University of Southampton have taken this one sinful footprint further , announcingthat they have developed a method to record data that could outlast the human race itself .
Back in 2013 , a novel character of data store technology was debut by the team at the university ’s Optoelectronics Research Centre ( ORC ) . Anabstractpresented at a conference revealed that a 300 kilobyte copy of a text data file was read into a specialised variety of methamphetamine , a small “ splintering ” that had been misrepresent by a laser .
Extremely loyal and intense pulse rate of visible light alter the nanostructure of the silica glass chip , creating incredibly small “ dots ” that could store up to three individual morsel of entropy . Strings of these dots were line up in three layers that , when aligned on top of each other , were no thicker than the breadth of a human hair .
This data was enunciate to have been preserve in five dimension ( 5D ): the three - dimensional position of the data dot within the glass was recorded , along with two additional dimension provide by the intensity and the undulation radiation diagram ( polarity ) of the laser used to mold the Transportation . Scientists were then able to record the encoded text file , which in this grammatical case was the 2013 conference abstract itself .
Promoting their twist forward of theInternational Society for Optical Engineering Conferencein San Francisco this hebdomad , the ORC team has now put down several bombastic documents onto their chip , include the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights , Isaac Newton’sOpticks , and the Magna Carta , all in 5D. However , this 5D aspect is not in reality the revolutionary part of the technology – the incredible capacitance and resilience of each chip is .
The King James Bible lay in on one of the chips . ORC / University of Southampton
The researchers take that each chip , several of which can equip into the medal of your mitt , can lay in up to 360 terabytes of data . assume one east - playscript is two megabytes in size , one 5D chip would be able to lay in 180 million of them . consider that around130 million bookshave been write , a record of humankind ’s history could actually be keep on one single chip .
These chips would also be likely to outlive our own species : They stay stable for up to 1,000 ° C ( 1,832 ° fluorine ) , and at temperature of even 190 ° C ( 374 ° F ) , they would subsist for 13.8 billion years . This number was probably chosen by the investigator as it also happens to be the current age of the universe .
Professor Peter Kazanskyof ORC said in astatementthat “ It is thrilling to guess that we have created the technology to uphold documents and entropy and stack away it in place for future genesis . This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization : all we ’ve discover will not be forgotten . ”
Image in text : The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded onto a single glassy chip . ORC / University of Southampton
