Laser-etched glass can store data for millennia, Microsoft says

The ever-growing vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last decades, let alone millennia. However, information written into glass by lasers could allow data to be preserved for more than 10,000 years, Microsoft announced in a study on Wednesday. Since 2019, Microsoft's Silica project has been trying to encode data on glass plates, in a throwback to the early days of photography, when negatives were also stored on glass. The system uses silica glass...