Microsoft’s Glass Chip Holds Terabytes of Data for 10,000 Years

Our knowledge of the past comes from stone tablets and old parchment. But thousands of years from now, our descendants may learn of our lives from a thin slice of glass carrying an impressive load of data—all thanks to physics that sounds borderline magical.

Today, Microsoft’s Project Silica unveiled the latest technological advances in what is essentially laser-modified glass storage for sensitive data. Described in a Nature paper, the system, called Silica, works somewhat like a multidimensional CD. But the revolutionary—perhaps strange—aspect of the technique is that it harnesses the properties of light to encode gigabytes of data within a tiny square of borosilica glass roughly 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) thick.

What’s more, the material could theoretically last 10,000 years, potentially making it the ultimate storage device.

“We are solving the ‘Digital Dark Age,’” Peter Kazansky, an optical physicist at the University of Southampton in the…