How did they come up with this idea?

Is this article trying to milk an Ig Nobel Prize?

If so, they’re very talented at it

Can't wait to use the AWS version of this.

This will be really useful after the nuclear winter.

Let's call it Amazon Glacier

1979 called, and they want their "Intel Magnetics 7110" one megabit bubble memory chips back. At the time, it seemed that bubble memory would supplant disk, tape, and even core memory (RAM to you). Maybe memristors will happen.

Incredible abstract image.

> The ice media can be preserved for a long time

lol I have some bad news

It’s neat but I can’t think of a worse storage medium.

The image at the top implies this involves time travel which would be necessary for the example of creating a bubble message in 1925 to read in 2025.

Honey turn on the stove I have some files I need to delete.

Reading the title, I immediately thought of Rabelais's "frozen words": https://www.classicalpursuits.com/where-words-unfreeze-the-t...

I have an even better idea: manipulating growth rings of trees for message storage. If you want to store a 0, you cover the tree with a tarp for a year to stunt its growth. If you want to store a 1, you leave it uncovered. Bandwidth is 1bit/year.

This isn't going to be durable. Not because of climate change, but because of surface energy.

Making a boundary between different substances requires energy, and forces will act to minimize those boundaries. This expresses as surface tension in liquids, where a drop will pull in its borders to minimize its boundary. It also happens with solids; if you pack a ball of snow and leave it for a few days, depending on the temperature it will slowly fuse into ice.

Over time, the ice around these information-containing bubbles will slowly move to minimize the surface area of the bubble boundaries, ending up as spheres. It won't be quick, but over decades (again, depending on the temperature) it will happen.

So, no, it won't be practical. (I'm sure you're surprised.)

(The effect of surface energy is my favorite fact from "Introduction to Solid State Chemistry" at MIT. Professor Witt was excellent; he imparted an enormous amount of information clearly and engagingly.)

* https://news.mit.edu/2002/witt

* https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/dmsehistory/3.091