Superman's Immortal Memory Crystals Are Now a Reality

Remember the memory crystals from the Superman films? You know, those storage gems that popularized the dream of being able to store information (or the soul of Jor-El) for millenia? Well, that science-fiction trope is one now one step closer to becoming a reality.

Scientists at the University of Southampton have stored a 300kb text file in nanostructures within fused quartz. Human souls, unfortuantely, cannot be stored using this new process. But that playlist you made your high school sweetheart? It could now outlive your great-great-great-great grandchildren. Or even all of humanity, for that matter.

Using hyper-speed laser pulses, the British researchers transcribed information into three layers of nano dots, each separated by several micrometres of glass using femtosecond laser writing. The team recorded and retreived the file from five-dimensional digital data on the size, orientation, and three-dimensional positioning of the nanostructures. The storage apparently can remain stability below 1,000 degrees Celsius, and supposedly has an unlimited lifetime.

Jingyu Zhang, the head of the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), told Phys.org that the team is "developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass" that could be ideal for projects and organizations saddled with massive digital archives. This means libraries, museums--hell, even the NSA--could save data for years and then compare it all with information gathered centuries or millenia down the road. What's more, the prospect of musicians, artists, and filmmakers harnessing 5D-storage could very well see their works and personas immortalized long after their bronze busts have crumbled.

The team from ORC shared their findings (pdf) at the recent Conference of Lasers and Electro-Optics in San Jose, and are now working on how to commercialize the storage development. Krypton is no longer a pipe dream for those who are keen on making time capsules.