Glass is rather notoriously the poster boy for fragility. It shatters, it breaks, it cracks. Mr. Glass from the movie Unbreakable is very much NOT the titular unbreakable character. And glass jaw isn’t winning you any boxing matches.

Counterintuitively, Microsoft thinks it can be the ultimate long-term storage method. Enter Project Silica.

See, glass might not be shatterproof, but it has a ton of other traits. It’s chemically inert, and nonreactive to electromagnetic frequencies, which makes it weirdly durable. How durable?

Media stored on glass can last 10,000+ years, according to Microsoft. This could revolutionize long-term data storage.

Something you might initially think wouldn’t last a decade could store data for a dozen millennia. Science can be so weirdly cool sometimes!