Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hacknewslogin 1323 days ago
Instead of metal plates with a clear coat, maybe laser etching diamonds? a 5cm square of diamond can store 25 exabytes of data. They will weight less then metal as well. https://newatlas.com/electronics/2-inch-diamond-wafers-quant...
4 comments

Wouldn't that fail this requirement though?

> The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.

Diamond can burn.

Though other crystals should be highly stable. Quartz seems geologically and chemically stable, plain old glass ain't bad. Something reasonably cheap is probably preferable, both from the cost basis (an expensive-to-create archive is a challenge) and the repurposing challenge (a diamond-etched bibliographic archive might have other appeals to those who chance across it).

Even parchment proved sufficiently valuable that works were often repurposed (and lost) through palimpsests.

Holy shit, this reminds me of the Jedi / Sith holocrons.
> a 5cm square of diamond can store 25 exabytes of data

isn't the same idea viable if applied to silicon crystals (which we already grow lots of)?