New Memory Could Store Data for 1 Billion Years
Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!
Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!
Of course, we have to ask exactly why anyone would shoot for creating memory that endures such a great length of time. After all, the memory devices won't be laying around a few centuries from now like data crystals from the Fortress of Solitude, much less anything that can actually read one-billion-year-old technology. However, in this case, the focus is centered on improving what's available, not saving old tracks of K.C. and the Sunshine Band for humans inhabiting the Earth in a billion years; the unrelenting endurance is just a cool side effect.
The American Chemical Society ingeniously sums it up best: packing more digital images, music, and other data onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more strawberries into the same size supermarket carton. The denser you pack the fruit, the quicker it spoils. The same holds true with today's memory cards, limiting the overall life expectancy to 10 to 30 years. Pack additional capacity into the same container, and the lifespan drops. The drawback is that today's industry demands more storage, or greater data densities, thus the need for a larger "container" is in demand.
Alex Zetti and his group of scientists are now nearing that goal with a new memory device that can actually store thousands of times more data than today's conventional silicon chips while providing an estimated lifespan of more than one billion years. While the idea sounds like an underlying storyline for a science-fiction movie, the discovery is far from fiction. In fact, the scientists plan to reveal their findings in the upcoming June (10) edition of ACS' Nano Letters.
In the article, the researchers report that the experimental memory devices use an iron nanoparticle--1/50,000 the width of a human hair--that is enclosed in a hollow carbon nanotube. When electricity is applied, the nanoparticle can "shuttle" back and forth without error, allowing it to record digital information and play it back like the silicon chips used today.
Currently some of today's highest-density experimental storage media can retain ultra-dense data for only a fraction of a second. As an example of today's limitations, the group refers to William the Conqueror's Doomsday Book. Surviving 900 years, the book was originally written on vellum back in 1086 AD. It was eventually converted into a digital version back in 1986, however the medium used to store the data failed within 20 years.
Still, not only does the new memory material provide a one billion year lifespan (at room temperature), it can store up to a trillions bits of information. "The memory unit can be written to and read out using two-terminal electrical leads operated at low voltages, facilitating large-scale integration, and is easily incorporated into conventional silicon processing," reads the team's article. "The nanomechanical system is naturally hermetically sealed and thus provides its own protection against environmental contamination."
The scientists said that the new memory will be able to be "played back" using conventional computer hardware. Of course, that hardware will look more like Stone Age tools in a billion years... that's if the Earth is still around to enjoy our stored masses of Family Guy videos and news articles with cheesy endings.
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About time. Now the question is.. what do the read/write speeds look on these things?
Aah, ever the practical gamer/OS-booter.
Price? Release date? Im really dissapointed about all these new memory breakthroughs. None of them ever get produced. Terrabytes on a quarter or stamp really excited me, same with the blue ray and dvd thats holds how ever many terrabytes. Why research this technology when we wont even use it.
haha, humans wont be around 1 billion years from now and what alien species would care out about our data.
For the same reason we are still useing gasaline powered cars the big componies want to squeese as much money out of the old tecnolagy as they can without haveing to retool and reinvest
Our tecnoligy is moveing at a fast rate maybe not as fast as we would like but maybe too fast for buisness to capatlize on it without loosing money
Lawyers will love this when it comes to discovery. No more defendant excuses about losing electronic evidence because the "disc went bad".
Hmmm, I wonder who's going to sue if the data doesn't last....one billion years. Heck, it could be one million years and no one would know any different.
in 1 bilion years , i dont think huamns wil be around ,a t least not in the way we imagine our selfs , i imagine long before then slight mutations in teh gene pool wil long ago turned us into a difernt species by the time we see 1 billion , that is assuming that we don't expire altogether/0hich is the most likely outcome , given the fact that the longest living speices ever discoverd was a dinosaur and even it didnt see the rise and fall of dinosuar 's on the whole , an entire kingdom of animals that only saw roughly 100 milion years before going extinct, us humans on the other hand have only been aroud a very very tiny fraction of that time (llik 20,000-30,000 years) so yeah i'd say wea re eitehr going to go extinct or be acomopletely new species by that time , which in that case whe wouldn't care about ahving 1 bnillion year old tech, if we are extinct , i guess waht ever creature evolves intelligence in that time frame could learn alot aobut us, Dog and or cat men perhaps ?
I would laugh should some day aliens find one of these devices and only episodes of Beavis and Butt-head are stored on it.
As far as we know, we humans are the most intelligent creatures to ever roam the earth. We are highly adaptive, and we are even able to adapt the environment we live in (build shelters, space ships, etc). We may very well learn to overcome natural disasters or even control earth weather. There has been talk among some scientists that our ability to adapt our environment to suit our needs has significantly slowed down our evolution. We may very well outlive the dinosaurs as a species.
A series of questions arise:
- what access time and density are they offering?
- are there any mechanical wearing effects present?
Remember the magnetic bubble memory hype in the seventies?
10-30 years? I've got 5.25" floppies that still work after 20 years, they were only supposed to last 10. I think most technologies last much longer than stated, they're just being safe.
Course I have records that are over 50 years old, now that's a technology that will last!
I bet the trade off is speed to the nth degree.
WE NEED THIS TO PROVE TO THE APES THAT WE WERE ONCE THE DOMINANT SPECIES!
Sounds interesting.
I hope that this technology is a success unlike many wonders we come upon.
100TB flash drive with 100GB/s throughput and 0.001ms search times that only costs $2.99.
All for archiving homemade porn.
oh dear god this is so win. now i can be sure that my porn collection will be safe!
Can we get rid if the double titles!?!?!?
This is driving me mad...so often
"haha, humans wont be around 1 billion years from now and what alien species would care out about our data."
You don't know that for one. Now to the next thing, why do we care about fish, spiders,snakes, etc... Maybe just to learn.
And whos to say they won't have things that can read 1 billion year old tech. Hey I got an idea, make a reader that can last a billion years. This would great for a time capsule not that it would matter much to us, but it might to the people in the future. Not to mention hey we could put some data on it and send it to outer space.
Just to recap
Can we get rid if the double titles!?!?!?This is driving me mad...so often
Just to recap:
Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!
Oh, and in case you missed it.
Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!
...what .. density are they offering
like stated, a trillion bits = 125 000 000 000 bytes, or about 116GB.
The title of this article almost sounded like this memory would survive a nuclear holocaust.. In theory it all sounds nice, but I would love to see a nano fiber of steel/iron keeping a charge of a few milivolts for over a billion of times...
About the aliens, perhaps they would perceive the memory as a stone, found or produced on earth. No say as to if they are able to decode or understand the logic of the encoded data on the storage device.
They would have to re-invent computerlanguage, divX/Xvid codecs, and an operating system quite different than what they would be using; and if it's true what's been said, then a billion years from now there won't be no old computers anymore. They'd be so rusted after 1000 years that they won't be able to boot anymore, let alone 1b years.
I'd also want to see where scientists will preserve these 'cubes' of memory... A billion years of wear and tear, even if it's just the wind blowing on it, will show it's toll on even these devices!
Re: Nano-MECHANICAL... Room-temperature... Those do not sound like the hallmarks of durability to me, and certainly not performance. That's not mechanical like a HDD, that's mechanical like a Ford Mustang, something actually has to move physically, not to read the data, but to actually change the bit.
like stated, a trillion bits = 125 000 000 000 bytes, or about 116GB.The title of this article almost sounded like this memory would survive a nuclear holocaust.. In theory it all sounds nice, but I would love to see a nano fiber of steel/iron keeping a charge of a few milivolts for over a billion of times...
First, just try to make the difference between capacity and density...
Secondly, the "nano fiber" is a nanotube of carbon, and not of "steel/iron", but containing an iron nanoparticle...
Also, the storage method doesn't imply "a charge of a few milivolts for over a billion of times", but the mechanical displacement of the iron nanoparticle, in the carbon nanotube, by an electric current, and the magnetic field generated by it.
Confusing, all this nanostuff... Eh?
The "stated capacity" and "endurance" are just speculations, to provide some high numbers, for those that are easily impressed by them.
"In lab and theoretical studies, the researchers showed that the device had a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch (a trillion bits of information) and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years."
Oh, well, some details got lost by Kevin, but it's getting us just a bit closer to the answer(s). There is no "proof of concept" device, yet, to sustain those guesstimations, just some experiments and a lot of hype.
This has been all around the net. I am somewhat surprised that Tom's has taken so long to pick it up.
I thought that I read in one of the articles on it that Samsung is already working on commercializing this technology; however, I am unable to find the article that references Samsung. Maybe Samsung is commercializing the holographic DVD.
The Singularity is near.... all this is irrelevant.
even the new memory could store data for 1 billion years , but could it still function properly after billion years ? it might already become a rock or already been melt or something .
Emm, ever hear of a little thing called the Voyager mission?
Evidence of your underaged daughter posting nudes of herself on Myspace will now last forever! Sorry!
A billion years is twice the span of all recorded life on Earth so far. Between plate tectonics, asteroid collisions and mass extinction events, it'll probably be insect archaeologists who find our long-lived data storage
Well in one billion years Earth will have all of it's water evaporated by a ever, yet slowly, expanding sun.
Interesting, I suppose it could be utilised by verticaly aligning the nano-rods on a conductive plate and using a scanning-electron microscope to measure tunnelling current, but the practical challenge of self-assembling half a trillion SWCNT-encapsulated iron nanoparticles into something resembling a useful circuit is going to be tricky, what are they going to use, very small tweezers? Sounds like most of the chem papers I read - people hyping up marginal results for the purpose of research grants. What have they actually done here? Wrapped a carbon nanotube around an iron particle - this is nothing new. SWCN's have been synthesized with many types of entrapped particles, show me a working 1Kb sillicon / SWCNT hybrid chip with the manufacturing process required for effective mass production and then i'll be impressed, very impressed.
Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!
I had to repeat again... like Tom's I have to repeat all headlines...
Now i am so relieved knowing my porn collection will be safe for a billion years.