Technology

At least give them to the nations which aren't currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)

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.

The degradation of materials is pretty well understood. If it’s truly cut from a well known material with zero factors that could effect that degradation, it’s mostly safe to make en educated wish.

You can stimulate wear on different types of materials and get a general idea of how long it would last. This isn't plastic in a dvd.

I mean, people do predict things based on evidence. Galileo didn't actually go to outer space and verify that the earth was going around the sun.

Any volunteers for testing the claim?

In case you missed it in the article, the transfer speeds are mentioned just two paragraphs prior to the one you cited:

Over the next three to four years, Kazansky said, SPhotonix aims to improve the data transfer speed of its technology from a write time of 4 megabytes per second (MBps) and read time of 30 MBps to a read/write speed of 500 MBps, which would be competitive with archival tape backup systems.

If it's slow, then it's the central backup and you use anything else for regular use. Just having it as a fallback for recovery would be huge.

That's the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.

We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min

That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.

Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn't need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive ... you'd carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter ... but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?

Not the business plan. This will be used as an archiving service for $$$.

Totally. This is the data equivalent of a “new battery tech will revolutionise your phone” post.

When a post is a link to an article, I would prefer that the post title match the article. Many news communities actually require that.

Skyrim Silica Crystal Edition

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”