This has nothing to do with cats! It could not be farther from the topic of cats except to say that cats like humans and all things are subject to entropy about which I am fascinated and which is one of the most important words and concepts in the universe. I have written about its importance in an earlier article which you read by clicking on the link below. It provides a pretty full explaination in straightforward language.
About entropy: A word that most people don’t know is the most important. Entropy.
Okay glass is incredibly durable. So durable that Microsoft have decided that in the future laser-etched glass may be used for super long range data storage of hundreds of years (The Times April 27th, 2024).
Ant Rowston, deputy director of the Microsoft laboratory in Cambridge said:
Once you’ve written your piece of glass, it really doesn’t cost me much to keep it. I just take a little bit of shelf space and I can store an awful lot of stuff. I don’t need to worry about it. If you give me data, we will store it and it will be there in 100 years’ time. It be there in 500 years’ time.
Our great-great-great-great grandchildren will be able to retrieve it. The current long-term methods for storage are on hard drives or tape. DVDs have lost their popularity because of durability issues and partly because of storage issues. Glass is the way forward and it can be etched by laser to store the entire code for Microsoft Flight Simulator even today. The future appears to be about glass as a storage medium.
Here is an Infographic about the durability of glass as a storage medium and why it “defies entropy”. It can defy entropy for centuries even thousands of years but not for eternity as everything including the entire universe breaks down to a bunch of protons eventually (trillions and trillions of years).
