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A question along the lines of indefinite preservation use to pop up on Slashdot pretty regularly. They were usually about preservation of photos, and the discus

A question along the lines of indefinite preservation use to pop up on Slashdot pretty regularly. They were usually about preservation of photos, and the discussion would devolve into a comparison of types of acid-proof paper. The fact of the matter is that if you're going to put a finite amount of energy into preserving something, then its going to last for a finite amount of time. If you use a stable medium like a metal plate, you have the problem of preserving the encoding in a readable state, if you use a naive easily-interpretable encoding then you'll need more of the medium. Even if you solve these problems for your timeframe, you have the more serious problem of keeping content valuable. The only solution for this for a curator (anyone with some kind of financial, academic or sentimental incentive) to keep all the info, suitably backed up, on whatever the most cost effective consumer technology is. As this tech becomes obsolete then migrate it. If there's no one with an incentive to keep it, i.e. it's perceived as valueless, then the info will degrade over time, but that's basically a description of entropy increasing over time, welcome to our universe. (Score:1, Offtopic)

Loughla 10y ago
Slashdot always fascinated me when it came to this topic - the conversations always devolved into paper storage or gold-platinum-lithium eternodisks. As if there was nothing between the two.
- kijin 10y ago
  Human-readable letters carved into granite plates with a 72-point font will probably last a million years, even a billion years if you're lucky. The real compromise, of course, is between information density and longevity. Your carvings need to be large enough to survive the blurring effect of time, but then you can't store as many bits per square inch.
  - awesomerobot 10y ago
    Until some teenager or ISIS faction comes along and decides to smash it, of course.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    All stones erode, and granite is not even the most durable stone, by a long shot. You'd do better with quartzite. Of course there are billion+ year old stones exposed at the Earth's surface, but it's easy to mix up the age of a geologic unit, and the age of the particular surface we can see and touch today. While the stone overall is old, the surface we see today might only have been exposed for thousands of years. I've been to see some of the oldest rocks in North America and the surface is not always the solid smoothness we think of with granite. It's often crumbly due to weathering.
    - kijin 10y ago
      All claims of information longevity assume that the storage medium will be shielded from the elements. Neither paper nor micro-etched metal disks will last more than a few years if left outdoors. For stone plates designed to last millions of years, a safe loation might be a vault 100 meters underground in impermeable bedrock in the middle of a large craton. Also choose a low-latitude location to prevent glaciation during the next ice age, stay far away from major faults, and try to predict whether your craton will drift over a known hotspot during the time frame you're concerned about.
lmm 10y ago
Anathem makes a reference to this. A clock with a complex, human-powered daily winding ritual is no way to make a clock that will run for 10,000 years - except it is, if the ritual helps create the human culture that will maintain the clock and bind it to continue doing so.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Even then, if history is anything to go by, societies don't last long enough to keep the rituals going. The longest continuous civilisation was the Roman empire that lasted about 1700 years in total. It collapsed 500 years ago with the fall of New Rome in 1453, and most of the important rituals have effectively been forgotten already.
  - gumby 10y ago
    FWIW ancient Egypt lasted almost 3,000 unbroken years as a self-governing, unified state; if you count periods of colonization and resurgence as you are with the Romans, then it was closer to 5,000 years. Now you used the term "continuous civilization" while I write above of a continuous unitary state. In that case, China has a fair claim to close to 8 millennia and Egypt likely on the order of 10-11 (basically within a millennium of the emergence of agriculture). Note that the Copts still speak the language of the pharaohonic period! After the Chinese, the closest long-lasting "civilization" would be I think, the migrants from the Caucuses who colonized Greece, Iran (i.e. "land of the aryans"), Europe, and India (and thence a bunch of south east Asia), leaving behind linguistic and cultural traces you can still see in Stockholm, Bombay, Bangkok, Qom, and, for that matter, Dallas. I put the scare quotes around "civilization" because it's much more diffuse than Egypt or Han China, and so I don't really consider it in the same league. But even in its attenuated form it's hard to ignore that it's now the most pervasive overlay culture of the world as a result of European colonization.
- zipwitch 10y ago
  Which is why the real-world version version of said clock derives its essential motive power from temperature changes: http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/

Loughla 10y ago

Slashdot always fascinated me when it came to this topic - the conversations always devolved into paper storage or gold-platinum-lithium eternodisks. As if there was nothing between the two.

kijin 10y ago
Human-readable letters carved into granite plates with a 72-point font will probably last a million years, even a billion years if you're lucky. The real compromise, of course, is between information density and longevity. Your carvings need to be large enough to survive the blurring effect of time, but then you can't store as many bits per square inch.
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  Until some teenager or ISIS faction comes along and decides to smash it, of course.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  All stones erode, and granite is not even the most durable stone, by a long shot. You'd do better with quartzite. Of course there are billion+ year old stones exposed at the Earth's surface, but it's easy to mix up the age of a geologic unit, and the age of the particular surface we can see and touch today. While the stone overall is old, the surface we see today might only have been exposed for thousands of years. I've been to see some of the oldest rocks in North America and the surface is not always the solid smoothness we think of with granite. It's often crumbly due to weathering.
  - kijin 10y ago
    All claims of information longevity assume that the storage medium will be shielded from the elements. Neither paper nor micro-etched metal disks will last more than a few years if left outdoors. For stone plates designed to last millions of years, a safe loation might be a vault 100 meters underground in impermeable bedrock in the middle of a large craton. Also choose a low-latitude location to prevent glaciation during the next ice age, stay far away from major faults, and try to predict whether your craton will drift over a known hotspot during the time frame you're concerned about.

lmm 10y ago

Anathem makes a reference to this. A clock with a complex, human-powered daily winding ritual is no way to make a clock that will run for 10,000 years - except it is, if the ritual helps create the human culture that will maintain the clock and bind it to continue doing so.

onion2k 10y ago
Even then, if history is anything to go by, societies don't last long enough to keep the rituals going. The longest continuous civilisation was the Roman empire that lasted about 1700 years in total. It collapsed 500 years ago with the fall of New Rome in 1453, and most of the important rituals have effectively been forgotten already.
- gumby 10y ago
  FWIW ancient Egypt lasted almost 3,000 unbroken years as a self-governing, unified state; if you count periods of colonization and resurgence as you are with the Romans, then it was closer to 5,000 years. Now you used the term "continuous civilization" while I write above of a continuous unitary state. In that case, China has a fair claim to close to 8 millennia and Egypt likely on the order of 10-11 (basically within a millennium of the emergence of agriculture). Note that the Copts still speak the language of the pharaohonic period! After the Chinese, the closest long-lasting "civilization" would be I think, the migrants from the Caucuses who colonized Greece, Iran (i.e. "land of the aryans"), Europe, and India (and thence a bunch of south east Asia), leaving behind linguistic and cultural traces you can still see in Stockholm, Bombay, Bangkok, Qom, and, for that matter, Dallas. I put the scare quotes around "civilization" because it's much more diffuse than Egypt or Han China, and so I don't really consider it in the same league. But even in its attenuated form it's hard to ignore that it's now the most pervasive overlay culture of the world as a result of European colonization.
zipwitch 10y ago
Which is why the real-world version version of said clock derives its essential motive power from temperature changes: http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/