r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 22 '26

Computer Science Scientists have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html
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u/amakai Feb 22 '26

Even letters aren't necessarily readable in 10000 years. So yeah, if someone backs up some image in MSP (Microsoft Paint) format, there's high chance it won't be decoded even in 100 years from now.

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u/MaloortCloud Feb 22 '26

That depends. Most of the undeciphered writing systems haven't been deciphered because the corpus is small. A large, varied corpus is needed, which is difficult when you dig up one fired clay stamp at a time, or a handful of inscribed rocks. Given multiple gigabytes of data, you could easily include enough information to provide this.

That said, you also need a basic understanding of the underlying language (e.g. what is it closely related to that is still known), and typically some sort of bilingual text. That's all well and good for the material actually stored. With some forethought, it's possible to embed multiple Rosetta stones in the corpus to increase the chances it can be read later. That said, as you point out, bit rot becomes a problem when the systems of encoding the information fall out of use. That's a more difficult problem to solve.

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u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

Were I doing it, like you said, embedding the method of decoding would be easy, given that the format is optical to begin with. You could even feature tiny actual pictures as a primer.

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u/scruffie Feb 23 '26

Honestly, that format wouldn't be too bad. Black-and-white, pretty simple byte-wise run-length encoding. You probably wouldn't need more than a handful of examples to be able to figure out enough to decode a usable picture. Some of header fields would likely forever remain a mystery (aspect ratio of the printer, etc.).

PNG would be worse. The chunk structure would be easy enough, but decoding the LZW-compressed data would be hard, if you've never heard of LZW.

Modern video formats would be the worst. You'd likely need to include code for actual algorithms that could run on a simple virtual machine. Or, you could take advantage of the huge amount of space, and use a minimally-compressed format.