That video you posted on YouTube of your nephew playing tricks on the cat could be seen by robotic androids in a billion years. If the experiments of a group of scientists at the University of Berkeley come to fruition, storing data that lasts hundreds of centuries could soon be a reality.
The technique to make this a reality is being developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, in a bid to improve the storage capacity of an ever-growing amount of digital data. Conventional memories currently in use, such as hard drives and flash memory, have an estimated life of between 10 and 30 years.
The difference is that these supports degrade over time. "To achieve a replacement for these technologies, the first step is to find a single bit capable of storing data for a certain period of time," says Will Gannet, one of the members of the project, in an article from The Daily Californian.
The device built by the university team, led by Alex Zettl, consists of an iron nanoparticle enclosed within a hollow carbon tube (A nanoparticle is 50.000 smaller than the diameter of a human hair). This nanoparticle has an estimated life of one billion years, and to store digital bits in it, a small electrical discharge must be applied to the tube, which causes the particle to change position.
According to Gannet, the integration between this type of technologies and some existing ones such as MP3 would be easy and not too expensive. "This project can help demonstrate that there are other ways to store digital data, which could provide advantages in terms of storage and durability."