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When 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
by dandelany 11y ago
When 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