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So I'd like this on medium that's a bit more permanent than paper, but with similar information density per kg, and similar re-creatability without having any o
by ant6n 11y ago
So I'd like this on medium that's a bit more permanent than paper, but with similar information density per kg, and similar re-creatability without having any of the original tools available. I'd like to store data for say 100 thousand years.
- chronomex 11y agoTyvek, perhaps? I'm not sure how long-term it would stick around, but it wouldn't decay as fast as paper in an unprotected environment.
- eplanit 11y agoYou beat me to it. Tyvek would be an excellent candidate for its amazing durability and that it behaves much like paper (at least in terms of texture).
- kawera 11y agoAn IBM researcher did this with a Tyvek-like material in the 90s, a polyester made by DuPond if I remember correctly. Just tried to google a reference but no luck.
- userbinator 11y agoTyvek is basically HDPE plastic, and relative to paper it has much poorer temperature resistance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-density_polyethylene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-density_polyethylene
- Adaptive 11y agoNot 100,000 years, but if you're looking for something that will last longer than paper, I recommend... paper. Rag paper. 100% rag, acid free copier/laser paper should be available at most office supply stores. I'd be more worried about toner de-lamination than paper deterioration in that case.
- kabdib 11y agoPaper's pretty good. Not sure it's 100K years good, but you're definitely better with paper than almost anything else in the modern world. People underestimate paper. It's vulnerable to moisture, mold and insects, though. If you can solve problems with breakage, very little is going to compete with glass or ceramic. So, something it's hard to apply breaking force to: Maybe etch glass balls, add some impurities for visibility, then re-coat with more glass for protection. A handful of beads will survive nearly anything.
- ant6n 11y agoIn a glass bead you could set up with the data and like a lens, i.e. the data is small and when you shine light through it it projects the information at a wall. On the other hand spheres may have the problem that they roll away; and you always need another medium (like a box) to keep them together.
- wmf 11y agoArchiving data to 35mm motion picture film has been done, including putting the source code to the decoding software on the leader of the film.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dandelany 11y agoWhen I was in college I worked in a lab making tiny circuits used for testing a nanorotor they were working on. First we would put a small piece of glass in a sputter deposition machine, which would deposit a thin film of gold on the surface. Then in a clean room, the gold film would be covered by a photoresistive chemical and placed in a machine similar to an enlarger in a darkroom, except it would shrink the image instead of enlarging. An A4 sized transparency containing the circuit design would be placed in the machine, which was optically shrunk to the (~2cm x 2cm) size of the glass and exposed with UV light. Finally, it was processed with chemicals to etch away the exposed gold, leaving the gold microcircuit traces. I'm certain you could use this process to encode data with a scheme like PaperBack, and if you could find a substrate lighter than glass that both resisted delamination and could survive the etching chemical bath, the gold film could probably last for 100k+ years.
- userbinator 11y agoEtching the data into silicon wafers has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeny_Ted_from_Turnip_Town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeny_Ted_from_Turnip_Town It does require quite a bit more equipment to read back, however.
- dandelany 11y agoOne nice thing about the gold-on-glass idea is that it can be read with a simple slide projector or similar. It's small but not ridiculously so.
- ant6n 11y agoGold itself may not be a very good medium for storage, because in the meantime (e.g. some intermittent dark ages) someone may decide that the gold is worth more than the bits they encode, and scrape them off.
- sago 11y agoThe Church of Scientology is transcribing L. Ron Hubbard's writing onto stainless steel plates, encased in titanium capsules and buried in the desert[0]. So in the event of a global apocalypse any future survivors or aliens may think that Dianetics was the pinnacle of our culture! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base
- mitchtbaum 11y agoConcrete? Perhaps a 3D printer could make a mold from a data format similar to this one, even one in 3D.. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-3D-Print-Molds-for-Small-Batch-Concrete-Cas/ http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-3D-Print-Molds-for-Sm...
- Narishma 11y agoHow would you read it back?
- mitchtbaum 11y ago* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_braille_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_braille_recognition * http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html * 3D Scanning At Home! (Using an xbox Kinect) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKb3oEM47E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKb3oEM47E ... If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much could we encode in a statue?
- ant6n 11y agoPlastic may already be sufficiently inert. Maybe compose/print sheets of plastic using two kinds of plastics, which will always have different colors.
- harel 11y agoClay tablets? They survived from Sumer, Assyria and Babylon thousands of years ago.
- keithpeter 11y agoTrue, some of them did. Any idea what fraction survived? I quite like the idea of being able to frame the backup an important piece of text and put it on my wall.
- harel 11y agoA significant number. The British Museum alone has 30,943 tablets. The study of Mesopotamia is relatively new and as far as I know not all of the tablets were translated.
- kabdib 11y agoYou'll want something that an unsophisticated civilization can make copies of. Might be interesting to have a stylized form of a modern language with layout that incorporates simple integrity checks. The monks who copied documents in the middle ages made a lot of errors.
- sago 11y agoThe Jewish scribes who copied the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible did use a system of integrity checks, in a traditional apparatus called the 'Masorah parva'. It wasn't perfect, and didn't have checks throughout, but as a computer scientist, I was fascinated to see how they'd dipped their toes into the idea. I wonder if there are other texts that were copied by hand that had similar approaches. The Qur'an, perhaps?
- jsilence 11y agoYou could laser burn it onto the rubber material stamps are made of. That would allow for easily making copies on paper. Not sure whether "stamp" is the right word. I'm talking about this: http://www.stempel-wolf.de/de/img/stempel/herstellung/gravur-laserstempel.jpg http://www.stempel-wolf.de/de/img/stempel/herstellung/gravur...
- aqwwe 11y agoI'm not sure how long it would last but how about something like a bubblegram [1] (laser crystal)... You could use a flatter plastic block and create a 2D image inside. Also, maybe other materials can be used. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jarradhope 11y agoDNA? You didn't mention price :)
- toufka 11y agoSee the front page right now [1]. Price of DNA is currently dropping! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246514
- ynniv 11y agoHow about 2,000 ~ 10,000 years? http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/ http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/
- GnarfGnarf 11y agoA company called Norsam (norsam.com) can engrave text on a 5" nickel or gold disk using ion deposition. They get 20,000 pages per disk. Nickel will not corrode. All any future civilization would need to read it back is a microscope and OCR.