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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 compr
by 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 agoUntil some teenager or ISIS faction comes along and decides to smash it, of course.
- snowwrestler 10y agoAll 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 agoAll 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.