10,000 Year Memory Storage

I have a few thoughts on this story, some of which you may not like.

Glass is notoriously brittle. Archiving data for millennia on brittle media seems fraught with disaster. It also depends on the type of glass used, borosilicate or soda-lime glass?

Today's hard drive platters have areal data densities in Terabytes per square inch. Hard drive platters are one millimeter thick, made of aluminum, with a thin (10 microns) magnetic material sputtered on each side of the platter. Comparing storage media (glass) to storage media (magnetic), then existing storage media density exceeds glass storage by many orders of magnitude.

Your proffered story sounds more like a pivotal aspect of an old (70's?) sci-fi novel. It does not sound like cutting-edge technology for today.

Yeah glass is brittle, but the oldest records we have are cuneiform writing on clay tablets. 10000yrs old ish, We have glass from 2000yrs ago that is still intact. So, a bubble in glass could if produced in enough quantities, could survive 10000yrs in theory.

Yes, I would agree that these glass data storage media could survive several millennia.

What of the mechanism, the technology, to extract these data?

Cuneiform in clay blocks… Lines dug into the Nazca desert floor… these are data storage media of their respective eras, and today we (humans, collectively) cannot 100% decipher many of them.

We today cannot completely extract the meaning of intentional and deliberate scratches in mud that are the records of antiquity.

The point here is, who is the intended consumer of these terabyte in a marble for 10,000 years data storage media?

What of the mechanism, the technology, to extract these data?

I agree with you, we should not concentrate on data density but on simplicity. And even if it can be read, it will require an expert in ancient languages (to them) to figure out what it means.

There are some data formats that are essentially universal. I've been through four operating systems and god knows how many computers, but text files remain accessible, if the hardware works. I believe an optically readable digital file will remain readable, so at least the first stage of decoding is safe. After that it's cryptography - discerning recurring patterns (ASCII or EBCDIC encoding, for example), translating them into characters, etc. There will be enough reference material to finish the translation, not like the agonizing work of scholars trying to interpret ancient Egyptian writings.

piolenc, you said “There are some data formats that are essentially universal.”

Do you mean like Unicode UTF-8? It has 1,112,064 different codes.

Unicode UTF-8 is pretty common, I would agree… Today, anyway.

However, UTF-8 is not the only extant coding standard, not by a long shot. And what about the next ‘standard’ for coding that comes along?

Unraveling and translating Egyptian hieroglyphs will likely seem pretty easy compared to the unwinding 172 different language character sets all at the same time.

I went through this very thing with a military customer of mine before I retired. They wanted all the computed aided design work we did for them delivered on dvd at the end of each product for their archifves. I asked them what they would do with the archives after a couple of years of application updates that required updating data files to keep them accessible.

They stared at me in disbelieve and asked what I meant. I told them that after almost every annual update something in the CAD app changed enough that all our libraries had to be run though the new software to keep them viable. Skip a couple of application updates and archives become data trash.

Nobody can imagine what hardware and data structures may look like in a couple of years much less millennia.

The data density of cuneiform writing tablets is nowhere near the density proposed. Thus, a chip or scratch in a tablet cannot lose much data.

Pyrex is borosilicate glass. It is very stable - movable from the freezer to an oven without cracking (if you're that crazy). Photographic plates on ordinary glass have been preserved for two centuries, so I'd take a chance on Pyrex.

I think your math on the sphere volume is off.

You say 25mm sphere, then solve for 25mm radius sphere.

I pretty much agree with redfred.

What did you use to get 11 significant figures from a 2 significant figure sphere diameter?

If MS's storage density in in mm3, why do you want to penetrate the surface to get more storage capacity? They are already filling the volume.

Is this where they are going to store all the data Windows11 steals from your computer?

Mind you back in the late 80s UNIs were saying about storing the data in a cube by using lasers to etch in the x, y, z plane, never heard any more about that.

I’m uncertain where HTRN found the subject article; I looked around and found this parent article.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/19/microsoft_glass_storage/?_gl=1*1tf23hb*_ga*MTg3NTE4MjYzLjE3NTYzMDc0OTE.*_ga_JXW44Y23NM*czE3NzE5MjgwODkkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzE5MzAwNjUkajU1JGwwJGgw

There is a comment and discussion feature available within the article that can be viewed as a guest. The comments are… interesting.