5D Data Crystal or ‘Eternity Crystal’, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“This is the most durable micro-storage medium ever created, able to preserve information without loss for 300 quintillion years at room temperature. That is longer than the anticipated survival expectancy of the human species. Potentially no world literature, no empirical data, no knowledge need ever be lost again.” — Professor Peter Kazansky, University of Southampton.
Sometimes a technology comes along which offers an unequivocal step-change over anything used before. This is such a technology, but it needs a mass-produced way to read it.
On Sunday 08 March 2020, a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, stored using advanced technology on a five dimensional data crystal, was presented by Prof. Peter Kazansky of the University of Southampton to Ian Cooke, representing the Curators of the British Library at a special 42nd Anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide event in London. The Guide became the first book in this new super-dense 42 plane format to enter the National Collection, with permission from the publishers of the first edition paperback, Pan Macmillan, who were totally cool and relaxed about it, after gagging and shooting their lawyers.
‘5D Memory Crystal’ aka ‘Eternity Crystal’ technology was developed by Professor Peter Kazansky’s research team in an attempt to upgrade our ability to store information intact for longer, improving resilience to the range of hazards and extreme environmental conditions to which data storage formats can be exposed through time.
What’s wrong with physical books? I like physical books! Well, so do I but they don’t last very long, do they? A few hundred years perhaps. Paper is susceptible to many forms of damage, such as liquid, smoke, fire, acid decay, mould, Philistines bending the spines, crayons, mice, insects. To keep a book intact for a very long time, you have to control the temperature and humidity in the room and, ideally, no one should touch it.
Okay, so e-books are the answer? Not really. Micro-electronic storage requires energy and arranging magnetically, so it costs something and is vulnerable to magnetic pulses and loss when copied repeatedly from legacy to newer formats. Electronic book providers also use the law to try to prevent Kindle-style ebooks being inherited, so every generation would be forced to buy the classics again. When the music format changes, people buy the Beatles White Album again.
The eternity crystal is a physical three-dimensional silica-based object that requires no electricity, inside which information is written by a short-pulse laser into high density planes at various inclinations or planes. The data can then survive, without any loss, unusual levels of temperature, moisture, impact, magnetism and cosmic radiation. Fungus, acid decay and insects don’t do anything to it that you can’t wipe off.
In 2014, the Guinness Book of Records recognised the material as “The most durable digital storage medium, stable at room temperature for 300 quintillion years”, which means it can be expected to endure beyond a realistic survival expectancy of our species. Its resilience to the conditions found outside our atmosphere was the reason the ‘eternity crystal’ in 15 plane density format was selected by Space-X to be sent into heliocentric orbit in 2018, on board Elon Musk’s cherry red car.
As researchers continue to invest, modify and improve the system, data can now be written to this format faster than ever before. A modification provisionally named by the team as ‘Type X’ has recently been applied and this, as Prof. Kazansky explains, inscribes “into high density oblate spheroid-shaped nanovoids with different shapes and inclinations. 250 such oriented layers of micro-storage has been trialled in the laboratory versions of the ‘eternity crystal’, but in this version data has been recorded across 42 layers. Another inexplicable coincidence.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was considered the most naturally appropriate title to commemorate not only because of the number of layers used in this version but also because of Douglas Adams’ fascination with science and technology. Prof Kazansky added, “Science fiction has a predictive quality, which is sometimes fulfilled much later by advances in research and discovery. With respect for Douglas Adams’ realisation in the book of accessing knowledge on the internet through a browser on a hand-held screen, written in 1978, it is with pleasure that science can now in some small way repay our literary heritage by presenting a format in which novels can be preserved for an indefinite period of time.”
This format’s small size, light weight (low mass) and ability to survive indefinitely in extreme conditions allows us to consider ideas such as off-world storage. It sounds unlikely but actually that reality is already here, as since 2018 one of Prof. Kazansky’s 5D data crystals containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series has been travelling in heliocentric orbit, courtesy of Space X and their Heavy Falcon Rocket.
What other applications could we think of for compact, fortified knowledge? We could send information in this crystal form on a light-sail to a distant star, for instance. We could send a crystal at the regular temporal speed of 1 second per second (or faster relative to our time, at greater velocity) into the distant future and say “Hey! If you can send information backward through time, e.g. through an identified singularity that we will be tuned to, please try it.” They can’t harm us as it’s only a communication. Before you say it, that it’s not possible in general relativity, sending only information through an event horizon is possible in quantum theory, given an exponential draw of energy. Seeding messages out into space for future finders is worth trying because, even if it doesn’t produce any results, it is quite cheap and, unlike SETI, the future species would have to do all the heavy lifting. There is a small matter of paradoxes, but hey.
For all those wannabee authors out there, crystal format has an attraction too. When an undiscovered novelist puts their book into this format, they have opened the possibility to reach an audience in the far future. Would that appeal to you, a chance to join the permanent cultural record of the human race? A chance to be found and treasured thousands of years from now, or millions, or billions — perhaps by a species that comes after us.
When I looked at the 5D Data Crystal, I realised I was seeing an object that will still be intact billions of years after everything else I have ever seen in my life has passed away. I’ve just fleeted past it as it begins a very, very long journey across time.
Worth thinking about? Are the implications worth losing sleep over? Yes. Eternity is the big picture.
