Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by sp332 on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @10:29AM (#20274544)

13.8 Gy is the age of the universe so far, in the past. Completely irrelevant to how long the discs will last starting from now.

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by lvh on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @10:35AM (#20274603)

What would be a good number of years to use? "Literally as old as the Universe is now" seems like as close a number as you can use to put timespans that big into _some_ sort of perspective.

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by sp332 on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @11:11AM (#20275020)

How about an actual estimate? If it's 100 billion years that would be an even cooler number to throw around. 7 times the age of the universe!

A more useful number would be MTBF or a decay rate.

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Re:Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for bi... by lvh on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @12:25PM (#20275826)

But the point is that decay rate is almost entirely a function of temperature, so you have to pick... something. Unless you feel like log/log years/thermodynamic Beta is a better way to communicate decay than “it lasts as long as the universe has been around”. (Which they do! In the paper! Just not in the summary because nobody has a feel for what log/log beta/time is.)

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