we describe a breakthrough that extends the technology beyond expensive fused silica to ordinary borosilicate glass. A readily available and lower-cost medium, this is the same material found in kitchen cookware and oven doors. This advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media. We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years.

Storing data inside glass with femtosecond(opens in new tab) laser pulses is one of the few technologies on the horizon with the potential for durable, immutable, and long-lived storage. Although we have been leading innovation in this type of storage for years, prior to this research the technique only worked with pure fused silica glass, a type of glass that is relatively difficult to manufacture and available from only a few sources.

In the paper, we show how data can be stored in borosilicate glass. The new technique stores hundreds of layers of data in glass only 2mm thin, as with previous methods, but with important improvements. The reader for the glass now needs only one camera, not three or four, reducing cost and size. In addition, the writing devices require fewer parts, making them easier to manufacture and calibrate, and enabling them to encode data more quickly.

Ten thousand years? Seems like that should be good enough for any application, and places it firmly in the science-fictional firmament of amazing ideas made real by engineering.

However, science fiction writers say "Hold my beer".

Consider the platinum alloy disks from Triplanetary, the 1934 classic by EE 'Doc' Smith:

Since nothing material was destroyed when the Eddorians were forced into the next plane of existence, their historical records have also become available. Those records - folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy, resistant indefinitely even to Eddore's noxious atmosphere - agree with those of the Arisians upon this point.

If that's not enough, consider the Universal AC (Analog Computer) from The Last Question (1956) by Isaac Asimov:

The Universal AC heard, for on every world and throughout space, it had its receptors ready; and each receptor lead through hyperspace to some unknown point, where the Universal AC kept itself aloof.

Zee Prime knew of only one man whose thoughts had penetrated within sensing distance of Universal AC and he reported only a shining globe, two feet across, difficult to see.

'‘But how can that be aD of Universal AC?” Zee Prime had asked.

“Most of it,” had been the answer, “is in hyperspace. In what form it is there, I cannot imagine.”

Nor could anyone; the day had long since passed. Zee Prime knew, that any man had any part of the making of a Universal AC. Each Universal AC designed and constructed its successor. Each, during its existence of a million years or more, accumulated the necessary data to build a better and more intricate, more capable successor, in which its own store of data and individuality could be submerged.

[Then finally!]

The Cosmic AC surrounded them, but not in space; not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyper-space, and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and nature no longer had meaning in any terms that man could comprehend.