Storing humanity’s legacy

For the last twenty-five years, Professor Peter Kazansky has been working on a project that seems to belong more to science fiction than academic research.

Peter and his team in optoelectronics have developed a unique data storage medium intended to outlast humanity itself. Known as the ‘5D data crystal’, the technology is not only redefining the now common phrase ‘data storage’ but opens a new opportunity to safeguard life on Earth.

How it works

The 5D data crystal may seem like it’s from a movie script – it’s been called the ‘Superman memory crystal’ and the ‘eternity crystal’ in the past – but its origins lie in the precise manipulation of light. Using ultra-fast lasers, Peter and his team have made nanostructure voids in three dimensions of high durability matter such as silica, with features as small as 20 nanometres (a nanometre is one billionth of a metre).

When they were serendipitously discovered back in 1998, these features were the smallest embedded structures ever produced by light. They change how light travels through them, in the same way that polarised sunglasses work, allowing us to read information about each structure depending on how the light is transformed. Unlike marking the surface of a 2D piece of paper or magnetic tape, this method of encoding uses two optical dimensions and three spatial coordinates to write throughout the material – hence the ‘5D’ in the name. It is inside these nanostructures, which have varying inclinations and are arranged in multiple layers, that information has been inscribed by the Southampton team using a short-pulse laser.

Unlike other data storage formats that degrade over time, 5D memory crystals can store up to 360 terabytes of information (in the largest size) without loss for billions of years, even at high temperatures. It holds the Guinness World Record for the most durable data storage material.

Out of this world

Over the years, the team has increased the writing speed and capacity of storage and, as the project has developed, so too has the global interest.

In 2018, Elon Musk and Space X sent a Tesla Roadster car into outer space, which then settled into ongoing heliocentric orbit. In the glove compartment of that car is one of Southampton’s 5D data crystals containing the novels of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series.

In 2020, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy became the first book in data crystal format to be entered into the British Library collection. It was the perfect novel to encase within the data crystal given the story’s idea of an ‘electronic book’. At the time it was recorded on 42 planes of data – now the team can inscribe hundreds of layers.

Peter said: “5D crystals are ultra-durable, high-density storage systems that can last billions of years, even under the harshest conditions. Books can fade and erode, and hard drives can decay. CDs can be inscribed only on their surface and have low capacity. The 5D data crystal is a significant upgrade in both storage capacity and longevity.

“We wanted to do more with it, to preserve things that aren’t just commercial. If we’re able to preserve information and choose which information to preserve, then we have a responsibility to protect vital information in danger of being lost forever.”

The human genome

The latest storage success has been to inscribe the full human genome on a 5D memory crystal.

There are approximately three billion letters in the full genome and, to ensure each letter was in the correct position, they were sequenced 150 times. This deep-read sequencing work was done in partnership with Helixwork Technologies.  The crystal has been stored in the Memory of Mankind archive – a special time capsule within a salt cave in Hallstatt, Austria. However, due to the crystals’ almost everlasting survival, the team had to consider that the data could be retrieved by an intelligence (species or machine) which may come after humans.

“It could be found so far into the future that no frame of reference exists. That intelligence may not use the same numbers and words that we use today.” Peter explained. “So, how would the finder know what they were looking at? We had to include a key that did not use words or numbers but should give the finder understanding of what data is inside and how it could be used in a living but emptied donor cell to self-replicate and grow into a body.”

The team included a visual key that transcends language; a molecular map of DNA’s building blocks – adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine – alongside the double helix structure of DNA; and instructions on how genes position into a chromosome, which can then be inserted into a cell.

The future unfolds

While the work is rooted in optoelectronics, its applications have the potential to be world-changing, addressing challenges presented in areas such as biodiversity, sustainability and social sciences.

The team hope the crystal will be used for the comprehensive preservation of genomes of plant and animal species which are faced with extinction. However, although already achieved with simple bacteria, it is not currently possible to synthetically create humans, plants and animals using genetic information alone as only sections of DNA strands have been built and used so far.

“We know from the work of others that genetic material of simple organisms can be synthesised and used in an existing cell to create a viable living specimen in a lab”, Peter said.

“The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities, but it is one part of the jigsaw, and it needs other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored, should science in the future allow.”

Nevertheless, the team is not standing still. Working with his son, and with support from the University of Southampton, Peter has formed a spin-out company called Sphotonix and has agreement from teams at the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Copenhagen to preserve the deep-read sequence of the woolly mammoth, which they intend to bring back.

The Southampton group have also approached the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China about preserving the Giant Panda genome – there are only 1,864 giant pandas left in the world.

Peter added: “We have the capability now to save permanently the genomes of important species, which are still here but remain vulnerable to extinction due to low numbers and a small gene pool. Using data crystals, information should never be lost again. It will then require a multidisciplinary effort, where proven synthetic DNA technology will have to be greatly scaled up, to meet the challenge of species re-population.”