There will likely come a day when humanity itself has shuffled off the mortal coil,

leaving behind nothing but data to list our accomplishments. However, most of the data
storage methods we currently have only last a few decades if were lucky. The
accumulated history of mankind surely deserves more longevity than that, doesnt it? A
team of Dutch and German researchers have developed a technology that could hold
readable data for up to 1 billion years. That ought to give someone a chance to find it and
learn how great we
were.
If you want data to last
for a long time, all the
fancy high-density hard
drives and magnetic
media is right out the
window.
These
technologies can be
corrupted over time and
rely on moving parts
that may simply fail by
the time a future society
finds
the
physical
storage medium. The
team approached the
problem of super-longterm data storage from
an angle of optical
consistency. The first
step was to devise a
material that could remain stable for eons.
The team settled on elemental tungsten because it has a very high melting point of 3,422
degrees Celsius and low thermal expansion. Basically, if you build something out of
tungsten, it will remain mostly unchanged over time. Tungsten is somewhat malleable,
though, so the researchers encapsulated the metal in silicon nitride. This inert solid is
durable and is transparent to light, which allows the tungsten pattern to be visualized.
The optical disk developed by the researchers employs an increasingly common type of
2D matrix barcode called a QR code. Youve probably seen them on product packaging
and in advertisements. Its a way to encode a block of text that can be read with todays
mobile devices, but the underlying binary nature of a QR code should be understood by
any sufficiently advanced society in a post-human future. QR codes also have built-in
error correction, which is useful when youre too extinct to make corrections.

The codes produced by the team

consisted of a large QR code that
encoded only basic data, but each
oversized pixel in that code was itself a
smaller complex QR code that contained
much more data. The lithographic
etching process used on the tungsten
surface could produce line widths as
small as 100nm, allowing for higher data
density than any commercially available
QR code. You would, of course, need a
microscope to read the matrix later. Data
density could even be pushed to the point that an electron microscope is needed to read it.
Simply having readable data in the finished product is only the first step, though it
also needs to last. Since waiting a million years to find out about longevity is a poor use
of time, the researchers used elevated temperatures to simulate it, which is a common
way to test aging. The paper claims that two hours at nearly 500 degrees Celsius resulted
in a code that was damaged, but still readable. This works out to over 1 million years of
potential life for the tungsten/silicon nitride disk. The team feels that with refinement,
reaching 1 billion years is likely. Thats considerably longer than past experiments with
sapphire-based materials.
The team admits this is just preliminary research. The tungsten discs could end up being
less stable in real life than the initial testing indicates due to the elements or exposure to
chemical agents. A completely different data storage mechanism could also prove to be a
better choice in the long run. This is probably something to get right we wont get a
do-over when it comes to preserving our knowledge.