QSFer Freddy MacKay flagged this story for us:
It’s estimated that humans are producing the equivalent of 10 million Blu-ray discs’ worth of data every single day – and all of those ones and zeroes have to be stored somewhere. Now researchers in the UK just might have the solution: a five-dimensional (5D) digital data disc that can store 360 terabytes of data for some 13.8 billion years. To create the data disc, researchers from the University of Southampton used a process called femtosecond laser writing, which creates small discs of glass using an ultrafast laser that generates short and intense pulses of light. These pulses can write data in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by 5 micrometres (that’s 0.005 mm).
So how do you feel about the idea that our books could be around for longer than the planet has currently existed?