Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data…
In this case the “Fragment” isnt even a fragment, it would be a completely intact start to finish monstrous amount of data.
The larger the “fragment” is, and more complete it is, the more trivial it becomes to decode it.
And since this data is being purposefully stored in a manner intended for future use, it’s very likely it will be encoded in a manner to facilitate and make it as easy as possible to decode in an intuitive manner.
Id strongly suspect every individual “glass” would have some form of “clue” or “how to” at the start of it, that serves as a guide to help the consumer know they are decoding it right.
Off the top of my head one example would be encoding a bunch of digits of the Fibonacci Sequence at the start as character literals (so text form), which even in binary form when inspected physically with a microscope, any scientist would go “oh hey thats Fibonacci!”
Then after that a large blank, followed by perhaps in order the entire ANSI character set from 0 to whatever it goes to now. Or perhaps Unicode.
The whole thing is only like a megabyte or two, so it would be less than 0.1% of the storage data, but having those 2 items at the start of every disk would be an easy way for the consumer to sanity check they are “reading” the data right, and clue them into “yo there’s data stored on here” very fast
Agreed, except in my crunchy post-pedal glitter punk opera they would say, “oh hey that’s the numbers my screensaver uses!”
Although seriously, what would dictate the “start” of the disk - the top, left, foremost block? I think we can assume they would try to read the data contiguously, but that’s about it. I guess you could have some kind of visual indicator, like it’s in a different colour…
Interesting problem!