Scientists unlock the secrets of Superman’s memory crystals

At the heart of Superman's Fortress of Solitude there lies a set of special memory crystals that contains the only remaining record of the knowledge from his home planet, Krypton. Thanks to scientists at the University of Southampton, in the UK, we've unlocked the secret of these crystals and can now create recordings that will far outlive the human race.

Don't expect to be able to create your own crystal continent from one of these (regardless of how you feel about Superman Returns), but from what the scientists at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) are saying, you can expect anything you record on them to last well beyond your lifetime, and indeed quite possibly beyond the lifespan of our entire species.

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"We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives," says Jingyu Zhang, the scientist leading the research at the ORC, according to a press release. "Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit," he added.

The recording method they used was to fire an ultra-fast laser into fused quartz with an incredibly-fine 'nano-scale' structure, writing the information as three layers of tiny dots onto that structure. A disk made from this quartz can hold up to 360 trillion bytes of information (360 terabytes, or about as much as 300,000 DVDs), and the resulting recording can withstand temperature of up to 1000 degrees Celsius and can last for up to a million years.

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"It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race," Professor Peter Kazansky, the ORC's group supervisor, said in the release. "This technology can secure the last evidence of civilization: all we've learnt will not be forgotten."

(Video courtesy: Warner Bros./YouTube)

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