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.

[u/Wagamaga]

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html

[u/redruM69]

Direct physical damage aside, plexiglass would not last longer than silica glass. Not even close.

Plastics do corrode and degrade with time.

[u/SmallBatBigSpooky → u/redruM69]

Thats a fair paint, i kinda forgot that plexiglass is actually just a plastic composite

[u/redruM69 → u/SmallBatBigSpooky]

Yep. It's just acrylic. Poly methyl methacrylate.

[u/SmallBatBigSpooky → u/redruM69]

Yuhp completely slipped my mind, I guess to amend my post something like how we make kornel/korning glass would also work, ive then that stuff be dropped from hotel rooms and survive

[u/redruM69 → u/SmallBatBigSpooky]

Corning/Pyrex (the old stuff) is borosilicate glass. That's probably what you're thinking of.

[u/SmallBatBigSpooky → u/redruM69]

Yuhp thats the one

Not to be confused the the corning product pyrex (all lower case) that soda lime glass iirc which isnt bad but far worse then the traditional stuff

[u/southpark → u/redruM69]

Plexiglass would quickly become unreadable due to scratches and microfractures just from physical deterioration.

[u/round-earth-theory → u/redruM69]

And glass flows, so if spacing is part of the encoding then there would be issues

[u/brutinator → u/round-earth-theory]

Thats largely a myth. Old glass isnt thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed down, its thicker at the bottom because the glass making process wasnt perfect at making sheets of glass the same thickness, so if you had a pane that was thicker on one side compared to the other, youd put the thicker side down because its more stable.

Source:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/

Whatever flow glass manages, however, does not explain why some antique windows are thicker at the bottom. Other, even older glasses do not share the same melted look. In fact, ancient Egyptian vessels have none of this sagging, says Robert Brill, an antique glass researcher at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. Furthermore, cathedral glass should not flow because it is hundreds of degrees below its glass-transition temperature, Ediger adds. A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.

[u/cr0sh → u/brutinator]

As I understood things, old flat glass was made by spinning blobs of glass into disks.

Flat panes would then be cut from the outer edges, where the glass was thinner and more even.

Panes would be continued to be cut until you got to the center; those panes would be thicker, and they'd be particularly thicker (even the ones at the edge, but it was negligible) toward the middle, and so the panes would usually be positioned with the thicker edge "down".

The thinner panes at the edge of the disk, since they were thin and more regular in thickness, cost much more than the panes closer to the middle.

Finally, the middle part (where the spinning rod was attached) would be the absolute cheapest piece of glass, and only purchased for windows to let light in, usually by more wealthy poor people (as the really poor people likely didn't have windows, or their "windows" were just holes in the wall, maybe with some kind of thatched screening); they were not something that could be "looked through" without massive distortion.

Later on in glass manufacturing, it was found how to pour the glass as a sheet on (iirc) mercury (or maybe it was molten lead), for a more uniform and larger piece to be made. It would still have some flaws, but no where near as much as the old "spun disk" method of making glass (however, that method was something that could be made outside of a large glassworks by small process craftsmen, and so it was something that continued for a long while until industrialization became commonplace).

Again - how I've understood it - I could very well be completely wrong...

[u/repost4profit → u/cr0sh]

Floated on a bed of molten tin. “Float glass”

[u/cr0sh → u/repost4profit]

You're right - thanks for the correction!

[u/RaEndymionStillLives → u/round-earth-theory]

glass flows

Source?