New Memory Could Store Data for 1 Billion Years

[exfileme]

Scientists are working on a new memory material that's capable of storing data for... get this... more than one billion years!

New Memory Could Store Data for 1 Billion Years : Read more

 

[mlcloud]

About time. Now the question is.. what do the read/write speeds look on these things?

Aah, ever the practical gamer/OS-booter.

 

[outacontrolpimp]

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.

 

[vorless]

haha, humans wont be around 1 billion years from now and what alien species would care out about our data.

 

[GAZZOO]

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

 

[jhansonxi]

Lawyers will love this when it comes to discovery. No more defendant excuses about losing electronic evidence because the "disc went bad".

 

[one-shot]

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.

 

[demonhorde665]

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 ?

 

[shadowryche]

I would laugh should some day aliens find one of these devices and only episodes of Beavis and Butt-head are stored on it.

 

[Guest]

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.

 

[ossie]

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?

 

[michaelahess]

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!

 

[doomtomb]

I bet the trade off is speed to the nth degree.

 

[apache_lives]

WE NEED THIS TO PROVE TO THE APES THAT WE WERE ONCE THE DOMINANT SPECIES!

 

[anamaniac]

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.

 

[fudgeboy]

oh dear god this is so win. now i can be sure that my porn collection will be safe!

 

[baracubra]

Can we get rid if the double titles!?!?!?
This is driving me mad...so often

 

[kingnoobe]

"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.

 

[JonnyDough]

Just to recap[citation][nom]gellert[/nom]Can we get rid if the double titles!?!?!?This is driving me mad...so often[/citation]

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!

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]ossie[/nom]...what .. density are they offering[/citation]
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!