This is important. With data stored perfectly like this, bit for bit, full knowledge of our civilization might survive the coming catastrophe. We might be the first civilization not totally lost after one of these big events.

Then again, you need high technology to understand and use these. That vault might get raided by people who have no idea what they are. The storage plates might end up scattered and used as jewelry and trinkets.

Fascinating, thanks

I get skeptical when I read "sustainable" so many times, it's like Klaus wrote it with all his implications attached. In spite of that, the tech is interesting, for sure.

However, in spite of the data being safe for thousands of years, the ability to read it is not. As is often the case with agenda driven ideas, they fail to mention the weak link while conflating the benefits of certain aspects of the idea. Like "clean" EVs, the devil is in the details, like the pollution being upstream of the vehicle. This technology requires advanced optics and computer algorithms to be able to read it. How long before the mechanical reader breaks down or becomes obsolete? That is sure to occur in less than 50 years, at which point, that drink coaster sized glass becomes an actual drink coaster?

Thousands of glass slides, carefully cataloged, line library shelves, where they can sit waiting their turn for potentially centuries or millennia. When someone does need to retrieve a piece of data, robots run along tracks on the shelves to the right spot, grab the required slide, and ferry it back to the reader.

Meanwhile in the future a nanoSD card will hold 1000 copies of it.

Just imagine the same thing from 50 years ago. A hypothetical vault of some storage medium that hold 1GB of data total, considered huge at the time. The cost of the what will become low density storage will probably result in its abandonment.

Some of the analysis is dumb, though:

What’s to protect them from fires, floods, EMPs, and all the other threats? What about the readers, which are delicate lasers driven by algorithms?

EMPs won't affect non-conductive glass. Neither would water, if they aren't physically damaged from high force. The readers don't matter because they don't store the data. They can be reconstructed.

But there are benefits to this glass data storage in the (much) shorter term. For one, it would slash the huge power bills that current data centers ring up just trying to keep the place cool and online – once these slides are written to, they’re stable at room temperature and don’t need any energy to retain their data.

This is probably the biggest benefit, not needing climate control.

So the crystal skulls are data storage devices from a previous civilization.

Also, who wants to bet the first data stored on the crystal was porn?