Nothing has been much better at recording information than stone. Paper burns (moulders, gets eaten by vermin). Modern computerized media are spectacular for data retrieval, but suck for the long-term.
But this (and some other parallel efforts) for glass-based storage systems have the prospect of high data content and incredible durability. That's a very, very cool thing, in a Long Game sort of way.
Of course, that assumes that those post-apocalyptic societies trying to rebuild civilization can actually read them, and don't just make them into pretty jewelry to trade with the neighboring tribe for aluminum cans.
‘Five-dimensional’ glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years
Photographs fade, books rot, and even hard drives eventually fester. When you take the long view, preserving humanity’s collective culture isn’t a marathon, it’s a relay — with successive…
Books are safer than electronic media. Giant Solar flare Electro Magnetic Pulse could wipe out almost all new data. Ever see what happens to glass in a sandstorm?
+Philipp Giddings Presumably the glass discs holding the core knowledge of the world are not being used as wind chimes.
+Dave Hill Library of Alexandria
It's still useful. Other than basic, near-full size printed media, nothing insulates from a technology collapse. But arguably, once humanity begins to spread beyond the cradle (and less prone to full societal, civilization and technology reversing collapses), a larger concern is data decay: a file will fall out of interest, the number of copies archived will become reduced, and when someone goes to review it they find that due to bit rot, aged software, or what not the file can no longer be read. Advanced archiving only reduces but does not solve this problem. But nano-printing, on the other hand, does: natural decay is slower for formations of glass atoms than non-volatile memory, and presumably the technology to look at small things and project them larger will always exist.
The issue is striking the right balance in both practical size and usability. I'd argue that, you'd want at least two archives per planet, and sending the first of such (no transmissions, for decay reasons above) requires that they be pretty small. Even at a coin per complete encyclopedia, that's a prohibitively large amount of space. And you can't go too far, or routine temperature fluctuations become as big a danger to the glass as cosmic background microwaves are to digital data.
Am I overthinking this?
+Gary Roth No, I think it's good analysis. Glass is not invulnerable (duh, glass), but it is (1) compact, and (2) not subject to normal rates of decay and degradation. That makes it invaluable as archive material, which is what I'd see it being used as.
All that technology and they chose to implant the greatest sham of all! Science!!!