Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for doing something similar.
Golden Record 2.0, a project created by students, teachers and researchers affiliated with Avenues: The World School, is also getting an assist from artist Jon Lomberg, who was the design director for Golden Record 1.0.
The original Golden Record project involved preserving imagery and sounds from around the world on gold-plated phonograph records. Copies of the record were placed on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes and launched into space in 1977. The idea was that if space travelers came across the records in the distant future, they could decipher the recorded archive and learn what our world was like in the 20th century.
Golden Record 2.0’s organizers are going after the same idea, even though they’re still looking into how their archive would be packaged and launched.
Project Silica could play a role in the packaging. Richard Black, a manager at Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab in Britain, has been leading an effort to store data inside thin platters of fused silica glass.
“It does that using ultrashort laser pulses that make a permanent, detectable and yet transparent modification to the glass crystal, so the data ends up as durable as the piece of glass itself,” Black explained in a Microsoft podcast called Collaborators.
Each coaster-sized platter could store several terabytes of data for 10,000 years or more, according to Microsoft. The data can be read out using a microscope, and decoded using machine-learning algorithms.
