Yumpin’ Yimminy!
Record-Setting Hard Drive Writes Information One Atom At a Time
It is a lab demo, which means it’s not ready for practical application. But it’s amazing data density: the entire Library of Congress in a cube 0.1 mm on a side (a very small grain of sand). One atom = 1 bit.
It’s not user friendly. A one-atom-thick grid of chlorine atoms is laid on a surface of copper; individual atoms are removed to create the ones and zeroes. Read/write speeds are slow, and the system needs to remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures. However… give it time and development. Compare the fractional-terabyte micro SD card in your phone with the “core rope memory” storage system from the 1960’s.
Using individual atoms as bits would seem to be as small as you can go. I don’t doubt that people are studying subatomic data storage, but that seems dubious to me. I suppose a way to improve the data density further might be some form of quantum computing… the actual physical data density might have reached its limit, but theoretically a quantum computer accesses a very large – potentially infinite – number of computers in alternate realities. So you could, maybe, have infinite data storage. Maybe. Of course, if you are accessing an infinite amount of data, you are probably accessing an infinite number of lies.
Assuming this system can be made reliable and stable over a range of temperatures and over time, the possibilities for data archiving become astonishing. If you could record all of human knowledge onto a grain of sand… stamp ’em out by the trillions. Use cement to form these memory-grains into bricks and build edifices. Paint space probes with these things. Record DNA strands onto them and record the DNA of many individuals of many species; use these to recreate whole species on distant worlds or in the future when species have gone extinct. A large number of copies can be carried at minimal mass; if there is data corruption, such as from cosmic ray impacts, the many backups allow a high probability of keeping the data clean.