Here, put this weird glowing crystal into the Heart of Gold’s navicom, it contains the location of the long lost planet of Magrathea.

Star Trek predicts another future technology; the isolinear chip.

Add: And the chips used on the original series were opaque, but roughly the same size.

I bet people in the 80’s said stuff like this when music started coming out on digital rainbow mirrors (CDs).

Isolinear chips have arrived.

I hope it’ll be like those communicators in the expanse, those things look fun.

Pfft just wait till we figure out Xenonite.

Optical communications, optical computers, optical storage.

That’s Glass-R but fot a few bucks more you can get a Glass-RW

So it’s great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I’m interested in if it was cheap enough.

True, but being very easy to make would hopefully keep costs down, allowing you to have multiple plates.

Also, this may not be for home use but companies that need to store data for years.

“Bob, why the hell did you format this as ‘Jim sux dicks’?! You know that’s permanent, right?”

10K years later

Alien captain: Anything to report?

Alien: We need to find a being named “Jim”, sir…

If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD’s back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.

What’s more important is the time and cost to read and write.

Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.

So its cd but fom the future

Turns out to be the lewd anthropomorphic creatures glass plate

Archaeologist in 1005 years: "We have translated the folder names on this glass storage device! The writings within refer to a important man named “Brazzers”, and there is another folder full of his correspondence to his “step sister” and someone named “Milf”.

“There is only the true religion of the Void, these heretic artifacts must be destroyed”

“Aliens”

You can have my upvote, but I’m not happy about it

Woooow

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Is that from Star Trek?

I have pendrives that look almost like that.

Many people have made such devices I think. There’s probably a guy somewhere with a shelf full of them.

Yeah, also writing 10 GB of data to rolls of sticky tape in the late 90s. It can be done, but it’s not practical.

Sure, if you don’t mind storing stuff and then never reading them again.

This plan it built under the assumption that more people will be using one drive. The value of scrapped data isn’t just quantity, but number of people.

I almost literally yawned reading the title. “Journalists” regurgitating things they don’t understand and hyping them everytime like it’s the breakthrough of the century. I feel it waters down actual breakthroughs and makes people immune or at least apathetic to these stories because it’s the same thing over and over.

It’s working!

10,000 TB of cat pics.

The goddamn telemetry code!!! Is ancient!! That’s why it’s so huge and slow

Minority Report had some glass storage stuff that was fun to see. He would insert a glass slide into the machine.

in The Expanse their ships are somehow powered/controlled by a shelf of things that look like this

Star Trek also has this.

I think the blade runner sequel had something like this too.

It was Minority Report, during the sequence when Anderson is going through the footage of the murder in the beginning of the movie. One of the guys puts some video from a nearby computer into a small tablet -size piece of glass and hands it to Anderson who plugs it in and puts the video on the main screen.

We’ve got some pretty good glove mouse things so we’re just kidding the pre-cogs.

I think you’re thinking of Star Wars. Like episode 2 or something.

In 2001, HAL is disconnected through glass like components.

I don’t remember this anywhere in the matrix

According to the article, they’re using their AI cloud service to decode the data, so it’s also likely so computationally expensive to decode that it won’t be practical. Seems more like a gimmick to woo investors that won’t actually ever see real world use, at least not any time soon. I suppose you could make the argument that you can back up data on it now, and hope reading it becomes more practical later, but then it’s more of a supplement to tape backup, rather than a replacement.

They’ll be able to use generative AI on a dick pic to reconstruct your conscious, make you feel embarrassed, then delete you again

You make a good point, and it’s funny.

But we can make estimates for the endurance of various materials from today. And we know the limitations of most of our media is quite short. So having something that’s predicted to last a while is still a good thing, even if we don’t have empirical evidence yet.

Ignoring physical damage, by being crushed or said on fire. We know that some materials are not inherently stable. Like they haven’t reached their final molecular state. Especially in the presence of oxygen or other catalysts.

Papers a great example, a lot of paper, and a lot of ink used on paper can be acidic degrading the paper over time. So we know that what’s printed today, the vast majority of it, is not going to last very long. Just because of the acid ignoring all the other issues with paper and rot etc.

So if they have some stable glass material that can encode data, and is in molecular steady state, so it doesn’t want to degrade on its own. That changes the problem from how do you prevent this material from reacting to its own environment, to how do you prevent this material from being manually destroyed. It’s a different problem, but it’s an easier problem

I get where you’re coming from, but I also think it’s fair to say archaeologists have at least some insight into what happens to glass over long periods of time. Hopefully Microsoft has consulted with them.

Bruh, it’s quartz glass. Tf you think is going to happen to it?

Just some real world experience:

Many, but not all books made of paper have survived the last world war. I’m not so sure about all the glass plates.