Radioactive Data Storage, Radio Communication, and Increased Capacity

Thursday, September 28th, 2023,?3:49pm, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

[Note: Written without edits as part of a study on editing and productivity. Ref: https://www.mattanaw.org/velocity-of-significance-and-ideation.html]

A long while ago I recall seeing an interesting posting about the prospect of having a new storage device that utilized cubical crystals, with information stored and retrieved within the crystal using lasers, that would write to it using three dimensions. I read that this device, using this very small crystal, that was perhaps a 1cm x 1cm x 1cm cube, or a cube of s similar size, would hold terabytes of data. This was during a period in which gigabytes of storage was still somewhat expensive, and the idea that such a small device could retain terabytes was very attractive.

Now utilizing microSD cards in the one half gigabyte size, it is clear that it is very easy to store huge amounts of data on very small devices. It is already somewhat strange that I can use such a small device to hold so much data, at a cost that has been under $100 dollars USD for several years now. Before relying on that media, I used the Samsung USB Bars which are USB devices that are also small, that could hold 128GBs and 256gbs. Now it has stopped its growth at 256GBs and this was my cause for moving to microSD.

The cheapness of the cost of the microSD for 512GBs has caused me to wonder at the costs of computer hard drives purchased from manufacturers including nearly the same amount of storage. The microSD is the size of a small SIM card, and is actually somewhat smaller. I’ve complained that it seemed a computer system could include more than one computer system functioning independently with more than one microSD card built in, and perhaps an array of microSD cards that could store huge amounts of information at low cost and size. Phones could hold easily in volume no less than twenty of these microSD cards without an apparent weight increase. Since now MicroSDs can be purchased at 1TB for $100 USD, it seems manufacturers could procure them very inexpensively, and provide phones and laptops with seperate internal systems so one can have more than one computer in one device, and also provide much more storage capacity than they currently provide, at very high costs. My most recent cellular phone purchase was for an iPhone12 Max Pro, which has 256GBs of data. It was about $1,000 USD. For my laptops, typically I choose those with smaller hard drives, using the hard drives for minimum application storage, and offloading data storage to my microSD cards. What is funny about that is I am using computers that still cost about $1,000 or more, being Apple products, but the application storage is only 128GBS while I have very large amounts of storage, much more than the computer provides, on tiny wafers of microSD cards. I have about 12 micro SD cards that costed a little over $100 each, I believe, when there was a brief cost increase, and two smaller hard drives. Together the micro SDs offer about 5TBs of data storage, and I have additional TBs of storage on the hard drives. Combining the 10 microSDs it is humorous to see how much data can be stored on devices that can be easily lost. But these are preferred because as I travel the world, I have a large amount of storage with devices that weigh nearly nothing at all, and I can redundantly store those devices so one or more could be lost but I would still retain my data. Furthermore, I can geographically redundantly place them so that I have all the storage safely backed up.

The above indicates some of my solutioning for my technology that I have developed but not the entire system. I mention this to make it clear I am very familiar with, utilize, and depend on, very small storage devices with very great capacity, so I can safely store large amounts of mental information and life-assets. I also have a scaling plan for the software and storage as market costs change, so I can safely update my storage to include differing devices with greater amounts of storage, as I scale and as the market changes. I’ve done that in several iterations already over the last decade. And of course all have experienced growth of storage from simpler computer devices since floppy disks and before that time. The earliest storage device I used for external data management was the large floppy disk that we like to remember “really was floppy” and later the 3.5 inch hard floppy disks. After that I used hard drives and zip drives. Zip drives were basically larger and thicker floppy drive-like devices that were input like floppy disks but had characteristics of cartridges. They had quite a lot of storage, but the shift to flash and usb greatly improved portability and easy of use. The zip drives still required a slot on a peripheral device that allowed for inputting the cartridge, and were somewhat like small disk drives or VHS/Beta video drives. Or like musical casettes, except again, they were read like floppy disks and had the small metal sheet that slid to reveal the drive within. I also used like others tapes for other readable media, which we forget really were storage devices, read-write audio tapes and cassetes, vinyl records, film for storing photographs, paper photographs, books and print paper of course, card files for reading (scantrons in education), and cds, DVDs, and larger capacity read/write disks for computers. I never used BlueRay or other more advanced DVDs thinking them antiquated by the time they came out. Recently I was forced to use cds once again because of interactions with the legal system as an attorney self-represented in a land-related prescriptive easement case. One can see from the above I’m very familiar with the range of storage devices, have used quite a lot, and it traces back to the 1980s which was very close to the beginnings of computing. I was Chief Architect at Adobe Systems nearly a decade ago, and was trained in Computer and Information Science in the University of Maryland System. In my education I was exposed to some other forms of storage, but these forms of storage were not too different than I was utilized and was exposed to already, having fortunately been born near the earliest consumer electronic computing device stages.I was young enough to have been exposed to some of the very earliest personal computers, word processors, video gaming systems, and used devices that appeared earlier than these in school, since they were still being used due to existing technology investments.

What is common to most technologies used before I saw this crystal devices is storage in two dimensions. Read-write storage on musical recordings like records were simply etchings onto a plastic-like vinyl material. I remember as a kid playing records that were made of hard plastic. Cassetes utilize a still available medium of tape storage that records audio and data. Microfiche is a film based information and document storage that is fading, but still exists in Anchorage, where certain older legal documents can only be researched using it. But to the present day, looking at all the other devices, they still were 2 dimensional. This includes compact disks that are basically small records, hard drive disks, floppy disks, and flash media like USBs and MicroUSBs. The implementations of the newer small devices and SSDs are not something I’ve inspected, but quick observation still reveals to me that these are not utilizing three dimensions the way one would want to, to have an extremely large set of storage on a single small device, using layers of sufaces that are microscopic. To give an example, consider if a compact disks surface were represented three dimensionally such that there were thousands of compact disks in three dimensions, for a small thickness. It could be that some current Hard Drives with very high capacity do some of this three dimensional storage, but as far as I know, this is limited. And probably by how it is written.

The crystalline three dimensional storage was expected to finally store on three dimensions using movements of more than one read write laser, that would pinpoint positions in the crystal to store and retrieve information. Writing was stated to degrade the storage, so read-write was not something that could be done too many times without degrading the crystal. But oftentimes we do not write entire disks often, and maybe this storage method could still successfully write to the entire cube thousands of times. I was excited about this technology because it seemed to create potential for scaling of personal productions. Nowadays my interest has transitioned from simply intuitively recognizing that vast storage was interesting, relating it to potentially storing also quantities of information similar to what is in a human brain, to actually needing such a storage to support the scaling of my productions, which exceed that of many enterprise corporations.

Seeing that the market trajectory does not include an easy pathway to store all of one’s information in a cost-effective way, while one scales one’s own media productions, is something disconcerting. It seems by this time that one should be more able to utilize a single device, or an array of small devices, to store huge amounts of data. But it appears the market only provides ways to do it minimally greater than what is mostly average at a reasonable cost. This issue relates also to the number of ports on a computer, bandwidth of radio communications, and so on, making it more difficult to scale to large amounts of productions, particularly when moving about, than one might realize. I will say more about this in the future.

Thinking about the crystal device that appeared about 10 years ago in print, and how it did not come onto the market, recently I had an idea about an alternative that might be of interest to those who are interested in computer storage, and the possible future for improving computer storage. I think I’ve thought of a possible device that may exceed even the storage of this crystalline storage that would be written upon with lasers.

The idea is that since radioactive material and elements exist that can transmit radio waves, there may be a way to combine communictions with storage on three dimensions. Like the crystal structure, there could be a storage devices utilizing elemental radioactive elements that are not harmful to people, or are shielded, or are used in quantities that are so low that they couldn’t harm anyone. With x-rays we already know we can shield with lead. We also know that low exposure isn’t serious, and that there are differing radioactive materials that are less risky than others. Radioactive materials provide a radioactive signal we know for many years into the future, with a predictable degradation. We know this because radioactive waste for example stays radio active for a much longer period than humans want, staying radioactive for thousands of years, making it hard to eliminate and treat as separate waste. In the production of nuclear energy we have refuse that we don’t know well what to do with, where to put it, and how to store it, such that future people are not impacted. While this is something we do not like or want, we did get communicated to concerning half-lifes and degredation mathematics indicating that radioactive materials do remain radioactive in a way that may be extremely useful in other contexts. It may be that it would be useul in combining storage technology and communications.

The storage device may work as follows, although feasibility is not assured without sufficient research and development. I don’t know for certain that this would work but still communicate it as a possible area for advancement. In three dimensions radioactive material is stored in a particular configuration that represents an empty state, ready for writing. This is the initial format. The radioactive configuration at the elemental level provides the image of the device, and the radioactivity and configuration can communicate the image to a sensing device, that can ready immediately its state. So initially it communicates via its radioactivity, something sensible, relating to the initial empty state.

Akin to the lasers that combine to write to the 3D crystal is an approach that reconfigures the elemental radioactive material to differing positions or configurations that represent the data to be stored. Perhaps a single text file is written to a location, or a single image. The radioactivity of the substance then communicates via its radioactivty to the sensor(s) that read the differences, or the actual structure of the medium. With this then is a read-write method using radioactive substances, and a possible approach to direct communication to the medium. It may be that peripherally available computers can read from teh same device using sensors that pick up the radioactivity. Perhaps it is not necessary to have direct sensing at a very close distance, like in a normal hard drive. Already there are devices like geiger counters that detect radation, and the level of radioactivity, and these devices are old, and don’t need to function at immediate touching proximity. They are operated by hand at a distance. Signals increase as one gets close, and if radioactivity is high, but signals are still received at a distance. If information encoded is captured at a distance in a consistent manner from material it may be possible to indirectly read from storage without radio communications that are now standard, like wifi, bluetooth, infrared, or through routers and radio devices. Instead the configuration of the elemental radioactive material in conjunction with the radioactivity of the medium could work with sensors that are external for more quickly and more directly communicating information. Currently data has to be processed through many systems and protocol layers for transport. In computer and information science one learns of the OSI Networking layers, that relate to networking and digital security, and the total architecture of a computing system. Much of the existing layers could be bypassed potentially if a receiving system can simply pick up the configuration of a three-dimensional radioactive medium.

Since the configurations could be elemental and potentially manipulatable using lasers, magnetism or other, we would have a more atomic method of storing information, meaning we are already at elemental levels of information storage. As storage and computer technology increased in storage capacity, we knew that the smallness of the electronics would dictate how much could be stored. Intel for example had to produce processors that were smaller and smaller to process more data. Likewise in the history of storage, the movement was from small to smaller. If more is written to the same disk, it means that smaller writing is required. The limit of the smallness is on the atomic or elemental scale. If one can write to a medium with a configuration of atoms, one has gotten very close to what is possible for potential storage. So a device like this may be useful for finally having maximally dense information storage, so we can have devices that would probably exceed in capacity what brains can store. Additionally however, would be the possibility of using natural radioactivity to communicate the storage, without processing in between, and with less networking protocols. Here we may have one potential idea providing a pathway to combining storage and communication.

If we had brains that functioned like this device, we would remember more, but also would have methods of reading other brains at a distance.

[Completed at 4:41 pm, in 52 minutes, without editing, semi-blind typed, without spell check.]

https://www.mattanaw.com/thoughtstream.html#radioactive-data-storage-radio-communication-and-increased-capacity