If it is so easy to write to, seems it would be equally easy to erase
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Denis Villeneuve nailed it years ago.
Similar concepts have been developed before, Microsoft and Southampton University were working on glass cubes with 3D laser etchings in the centre around 2015-16
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Oh yeah? Well take a look at these Elder Scrolls over here.
Wait no, not literally! 😵💫 🔥
Skyrim Silica Crystal Edition
...but only one million years into it's life span the human race is gone and aliens are unwittingly melting them down for raw material.
Waiting for the consumer reader and writer of those things, call me then
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Permanent storage. Like the Wayback massive and internet archive I hope will fully take advantage of these. As well as project Gutenberg. So much else. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time
Good luck finding a reading device for it in 100y, let alone 14 billion years. I doubt there will be a human civilization a few thousand years from now. :)
Remember how humanity had problems understanding the meaning of ancient egypt hyroglyphs from just a few thousand years back until The Rosetta stone was found and some really clever and dedicated guy put an awful lot of work into the translation? Good luck with JPG images or pdf documents or even ASCII text.
It's OK to make fun of non-existing/ not yet market ready devices, no?
As long as as humans haven't succumed to brainrot and still have capacity for math and logic, we can figure it out. It's encoded, not encrypted.
The classic problem of long-term nuclear waste warning messages is about conveying information over cultural barriers. This is a concrete data type, not interpretation of vague contexual meanings from pictograms. Math and logic don't change while cultures do. Images are far more retrievable than the meaning of an image.
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Images would likely be the easiest possible thing to translate compared to more arbitrary codes since in that situation the output should be more easily decodable?
Also, there's plenty of easy solutions to that.
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I was actually thinking whichever company bringing this for the masses will abandon its support 5y later and 25y from now we won't be able to read it at all, let alone decode the bits.
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All of this is useless because they can't be used to replace an ssd
I'm pretty sure I still hear of people using tapes for extremely long term but not often accessed storage. This sounds, just from the title, like it could be useful for that.
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Time for some Horizon: Zero Dawn style Vantage points.
It's amazing to see all the effort we all put in perfecting technology to long-term store our porn. 360TB? I'd like to order 2 please.
"We are a technology licensing company"
This is good news from the point of view of being able to create devices that can read these crystals; as a comment on the linked site says:
The realistic lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.
Tbh my own personal use case is getting buried with all of my data and become some kind of data-“Tollund man” in the year 4000, when they dig up my data cube and study it endlessly.
I expect them to build a reading device to do this; it’s the least I would expect if they want to study the holiday I was on in Bergen, or completely misunderstand the two hotdog pictures I happen to have as some kind of fellatio training device.
“Myes, we do believe family structures were loosely organised around the remote picture beaming devices that used to be called “te levision”
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Is it rewritable to an extensive degree? If not its just a backup medium, not day-to-day storage. Still useful, but more disposable.
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Every year or so some company comes along and announces some new storage technology that exponentially increases capacity or lifetime or both. Then nothing more is ever said about it and it never appears.
At one point we said the same thing about solid state drives
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