Charles Stross: Crystals Will Keep Our Memories

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) - the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.