terabytes

One of the big drawbacks of data recorded by our culture is that it’s longevity relies on the robustness of the medium that it is encoded on: paper rots, magnetic sectors on hard drives fade, and the plastic and aluminum used in optical disks like DVDs eventually degrade and oxidize. The ancients had a penchant for setting things down in stone, a method of preserving information that seems to have worked quite well, but it’s a method that our culture doesn’t use very frequently. But what if we were to encode information in glass?
read more