Men in Black builds
a universe in a cat's collar.
Thing is we're getting close to it.
Meet 5D as in the fifth
dimension.
Humanity's new way to store information
in almost just as little space.
The smaller and more robust
information storage devices get
the more likely they'll be able to outlive
us. And isn't that exactly
what we want?
For the things we do
and the things we say
and create
and feel to live beyond
us. If everything were to remain
as it is
with our faulty hard drives
and flimsy CDs all the
information we have today would degrade
and soon. But what if we thought of a
new way to conceptualize
information.
What if information couldn't just
be recorded in three dimensional space.
What if computers could learn to read
information based on the bending
of light inside glass.
Well that makes literally no sense
unless your researcher
at the UK University of Southampton.
These guys deserve all of the awards
because of their sheer ability
to conceive of an extra dimension
of digital information.
In 2013 they
successfully created a glass
disk that reads data in
five dimensions of space.
A glass disk that stores
information so densely that
it retains three thousand times
the information of a normal CD.
And brownie points,
according to the university, it lasts
something like thirteen point eight billion
years which is the age of the known
universe and three times the age of Planet
Earth itself
and sustain the blistering heat of a
thousand degrees Celsius.
This Blu ray Disc stores 128
gigabytes of data,
a glass disk of the same size
stores 360
terabytes.
That would take up a hard drive the size
of my entire body.
Here's how this scientific black magic
works. Think of it like a normal CD
a normal everyday household
CD is just a bunch of lines
in a circle.
Each line has a bump
and each bump gets read by a laser
as a one a yes
an on.
No bump means zero no
off. These two dimensions
on and off are
binary code.
The language of every computer ever
and its most basic these glass
disks shatter those bumps
and stacked them into three layers
to make a nano structure only lasers
can read. Creating these three dimensions
of X Y
and Z is what makes storing
this mind boggling amount
of data even possible.
And they call it nano grating.
Which I think sound like a weapon in a Star Trek
flick. They placed nano scale dots so
precisely that they can sit in different
orientations making the light
refract off of them in different directions
entirely
and at different intensities.
Some dots let in a ton of light
and other dots not so much.
With a special disk reader that is on its
way to becoming commercially viable
product these devices use a
powerful microscope
and a polarizer to read the data
of bombs stacked up
at different degrees letting light through
or not.
The tech is pretty much perfected
at this point
and because the glass is an incredibly
tough material it can not only
encode anything digital
but survive most any damage
that would completely warp
and a CD or hard drive that exists
today ever.
Just to prove it,
the researchers at the University of Southampton
put copies of the Bible
Isaac Newton's optics
and the UN Declaration of
Human Rights on discs already.
For today though the tech that makes these glass
Superman crystals isn't cheap
which is what's stopping it from being in your home.
Right now,
though
formats, this tech is already
here, and as it matures it will
get cheaper and easier for us
it's always a challenge to get people to adopt a new technological
to make
and that will ultimately make it the more
attractive option for the future
of information.
For the future of us.