Manipulating trapped air bubbles in ice for message storage in cold regions | Hacker News Reader

Manipulating trapped air bubbles in ice for message storage in cold regions

cell.com

64 points__rito__25 comments

I have an even better idea: manipulating growth rings of trees for message storage. If you want to store a 0, you cover the tree with a tarp for a year to stunt its growth. If you want to store a 1, you leave it uncovered. Bandwidth is 1bit/year.

Won't the tree die if covered for an entire year, and thus when you ... EOFError: Please remove tarp

You can make the tarp semi-translucent, so that it lets through just enough light to keep the tree alive, and produce a thin growth ring for that year.

> The ice media can be preserved for a long time

lol I have some bad news

Ice cores have been drilled down to levels that have ice unaffected for millions of years.

Well, that ice clearly won't be there for another million. It's already been removed.

The point is that ice can indeed preserve information for a long time, if properly stored. The original comment in this thread is a pretty vacuous response to the article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...

This isn't going to be durable. Not because of climate change, but because of surface energy.

Making a boundary between different substances requires energy, and forces will act to minimize those boundaries. This expresses as surface tension in liquids, where a drop will pull in its borders to minimize its boundary. It also happens with solids; if you pack a ball of snow and leave it for a few days, depending on the temperature it will slowly fuse into ice.

Over time, the ice around these information-containing bubbles will slowly move to minimize the surface area of the bubble boundaries, ending up as spheres. It won't be quick, but over decades (again, depending on the temperature) it will happen.

So, no, it won't be practical. (I'm sure you're surprised.)

(The effect of surface energy is my favorite fact from "Introduction to Solid State Chemistry" at MIT. Professor Witt was excellent; he imparted an enormous amount of information clearly and engagingly.)

* https://news.mit.edu/2002/witt

* https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/dmsehistory/3.091

So it's only useful for encoding spheres!

Let's call it Amazon Glacier

New cold storage tier?

Minimal contract measured in literal ice ages.

1979 called, and they want their "Intel Magnetics 7110" one megabit bubble memory chips back. At the time, it seemed that bubble memory would supplant disk, tape, and even core memory (RAM to you). Maybe memristors will happen.

Reading the title, I immediately thought of Rabelais's "frozen words": https://www.classicalpursuits.com/where-words-unfreeze-the-t...

Incredible abstract image.

Is this article trying to milk an Ig Nobel Prize?

If so, they’re very talented at it

The image at the top implies this involves time travel which would be necessary for the example of creating a bubble message in 1925 to read in 2025.

It’s neat but I can’t think of a worse storage medium.

Honey turn on the stove I have some files I need to delete.

This will be really useful after the nuclear winter.

Can't wait to use the AWS version of this.

Perhaps it will become their cheapest tier of Amazon Glacier?

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier

How did they come up with this idea?

Probably inspired by the first Michael Bay Transformers movie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com