Is Elon Musk the ultimate eccentric, bouncing around the world flush with cash and fast cars? Or is he an evil genius who strings us all along with his madcap schemes until eventually he turns Hank Scorpio and blows up France?

Last week he was looking a little more like the former as his space rocket, the Falcon Heavy, finally launched into orbit complete with one of his Tesla sportscars onboard.

According to reports today, however, the rocket might well have had a smaller cargo on it that could well pull Elon back towards the other camp, in which he builds an island with his own face on it and invests in a shark tank.

The Falcon Heavy is also carrying is a '5D data crystal' that has a shelf life of over 5 billion years and contains 360 terrabytes of data - packed with data that Musk has uploaded to it.

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Credit: Arch Mission

His 'best of humanity' selection apparently includes Issac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, a 1950s sci-fi series of which Musk is thought to be particularly fond.

The science behind the data crystal is pretty nifty in fairness. Knowing that the crystal was going to be blasted into the infinite blackness of space, the storage unit can withstand temperatures of up to 1000°C and has an almost infinite lifetime, thanks to a new 'eternal' data archiving system.

The tech, created by Arch Mission, is made of nanostructured glass and keeps data in 5 dimensions, which we presume is one better than four and two better than 3.

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It was first muted back in 2013 and the researchers who made it are rightly proud of their work.

Like all of the greatest advancements in human society - Craig David, Theo Walcott, the Spitfire - it was produced in Southampton.

Professor Peter Kazansky of the University of Southampton Arch Mission said: "This is major step forward for humankind and I am delighted that the Optoelectronics Research Centre is part of this mission.

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