10 ms·

Memory of Mankind: All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine

129 points by randomerr 10y ago

Spooky23 10y ago
This guy is on point. This era will be a black hole in history. I've worked in projects with archivists in a few US government entities --there's hardly anything for more recent administrations. Between easy deletion/loss of data and the difficulty of maintaining access to file formats over time, lots of stuff will vanish.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Clearly we don't capture or archive much of what's produced now, but that's not a new thing. There are very few records of things from more than a couple of hundred years ago. If you want to see anything that isn't the official government's (or monarch's) line there's much, much less. If you ignore digital media, and compare the number of physical books produced, there are many thousands of times more produced now than there were 500 years ago. You're right in the sense that a lot will be lost, and that we should strive to do better, but in terms of comparison to the past we're preserving an exceptional amount of knowledge.
- nolok 10y ago
  Not a blackhole compared to the rest of history. If anything, the ~100 years before this 'era' of temporary information that quickly disappears was the exception. We're just slowly reverting to how it was before.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kirykl 10y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/100yearsago/comments/5mlwch/jan_7_1917_editorial_cartoon_historian_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/100yearsago/comments/5mlwch/jan_7_1...
- mustacheemperor 10y ago
  A black hole relative to when? We're missing the other six parts of the Iliad epic. The play which beat Oedipus Rex at a Grecian theater festival has been lost forever. Incredibly minuscule amounts of recorded history have been preserved until recently.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    You can access the public and private papers of most US Presidents, for example. We have letters from US Civil War soldiers and immigrants that are important primary sources. My wife worked for a municipal water utility which possesses very old (early 19th century) records that shed light into how certain developments in the city's history progressed. Today that equivalent information is all electronic and most will be inaccessible in a decade or less. Getting insight into how people thought in the past will be harder for this era. Letters are replaced by electronic communication that is difficult to save and store casually. Things like annual reports are electronic only. Lost Greek works weren't lost because they weren't recorded. They were destroyed by the fall of that civilization and the wars and chaos that followed.
    - jjuel 10y ago
      So there won't be any wars or fall of civilizations anymore that could destroy even physical work? We are one crazy world leader from everything being bombed into oblivion. I don't think recording things physically is going to preserve anything in that case.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >This era will be a black hole in history. What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here. I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Civilization is fragile. We have the technology to make total war a suicide mission. But we have the hubris to destroy society from within.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    >I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
ekidd 10y ago
The largest preservation effort along these lines—though not using ceramics—is probably the Internet Archive, which seals physcial materials into shipping containers. Some examples: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-books-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi... http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-internet-archive-continues-inform-serve-inspire/ http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-int... This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially) or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the hair of mummies for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  > In 1974 Egyptologists visiting his tomb noticed that the mummy's condition was rapidly deteriorating and flew it to Paris for examination. Ramesses II was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as "King (deceased)". Humanity is simply amazing... we have come so far. A king who died ~3500 years ago was flown thousands of kilometers on a plane and was issued his own passport! > bury them in the North African desert How viable do you think would it be to setup a business that provides storage space and tracking capability in the Tunisian desert? I'm from Tunisia btw, and I think government seed funds would be happy to fund something like that. The biggest issue is who would actually pay for a service like that?
  - ekidd 10y ago
    One big question in the minds of many customers might be political stability. Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct? Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two world wars. There's definitely a commericial market for storing paper documents for decades, maybe up to a century. This is currently addressed by existing mine-based storage companies, among other things. Plus mines are secure: There's often only one way in and the storage is surrounded by rock. Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something.
hashberry 10y ago
This is global doomsday level thinking. Reminds me of Y2K. And using clay? This seems very sentimental. Are there not more long-lasting mediums? Especially with laser printing where we can quickly engrave knowledge without the risk of human error or time-consuming manual labor.
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  > Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it’s emboldened by fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from earlier than 3000 B.C.E. Ceramic is very stable during time. All modern media that you might think (LP? tapes? Optical disks?) require some special instrument to recover the information, other than simply looking at it (perhaps using some microscope). Paper degrades. Plastic degrades, in general. Metals rust. But stones and ceramics tend to be very durable, including against microorganisms and chemicals. They just don't withstand mechanical forces, like a hammer. But anyone willing to use a hammer would use any other thing to destroy other medias, too.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Ceramic is too general a term. Clay in particular reacts very badly to fire and moderately badly to water (what matters for long time storage). Very few Sumerian tablets are still around, and most of them partially destructed. There are many better kinds of ceramic available, even glass would be a better choice.
    - woliveirajr 10y ago
      Yes, I wasn't taking "clay" by its literal term from the news, but thinking that being a ceramicist he would know how to make ceramics that last longer.
  - jaddood 10y ago
    What happens to all this information if an earthquake happens, and that's probably even more of a concern when digging deeper. Don't you think?
f_allwein 10y ago
makes you wonder what future generations/ alien visitors will think of us when they discover it. I bet they'd be amazed/ puzzled.
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  they'll most likely see us as primitive. but they will be grateful for the pain we endured to let humanity continue to the next evolutionary step. Sort of like how we look at Neanderthals today.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  im sure it will be just like hieroglyphics. we know it means something, but we dont know what.
bprasanna 10y ago
Good to see an effort in a right direction. Though i feel like boasting about my post, this post https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-security/ https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-security/ was written 8 years back!!!
13of40 10y ago
Besides making the information last 10,000 years, I think another challenge is coming up with a way of indexing that much data so that you can meaningfully search through it without a computer. Something like a combination of a concordance and a card catalog, with some kind of redundancy built. Another interesting thing to ponder is whether you could structure it so there are basic pieces of knowledge, like guidance for developing computing, so they can index the rest of the thing and search it programmatically. I reckon we might be too far removed from our roots to do a good job at that, though...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
freddy5 10y ago
Or you know, launch it into geostationary orbit or medium earth orbit[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule
- ablation 10y ago
  I was mulling on something similar the other day, except I was thinking that it might be sent to a Lagrange point. Might be more stable/less in harms way?
felipemnoa 10y ago
I wonder if instead we could encode this information in a metal that does not corrode, like gold. Unfortunately gold is also a precious metal. Silver or copper are good candidates too. The transcription of data could be done with a laser in microprint. The data could also be encoded similar to how we encode dvds but instead of just etching a tiny mark a partial hole could be punched half way through for every ON bit. This way the data would be less susceptible to scratches. Make the disc 1 centimeter thick and the holes .5 centimeters deep. This way it would take a lot to destroy the data. A simple scratch would not do it. Anybody with a microscope and the knowledge of binary would be able to decode this. The instructions could be printed on the other side in microprint That could be read with a microscope. Books and scientific journals could be the first to be encoded. Reputable newspapers could be next. Maybe the entire library of congress. Social media data can be encoded dead last or not at all since it would not help in rebuilding a civilization. We do not need to encode every tweet.
- mitchtbaum 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  - felipemnoa 10y ago
    Cool! Didn't know about this. This is definitely a start.
chiph 10y ago
While encoding this onto 1mm ceramic sheets is impressive, if it is to survive a fall of civilization, it needs to be immediately obvious that it has readable and useful text and not depend on a 10x magnifying glass. So they probably ought to be Sumerian tablet-sized.
Animats 10y ago
There was a US project in the 1950s, as part of Civil Defense, to put all the information needed to rebuild industrial society on microfiche. Copies, along with microfiche viewers that worked in sunlight, without power, were put in major fallout shelters. Try to find one of those today.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  A University I attended had fallout shelters in at least one of its major campus libraries (also a National Archive IIRC). Might not be 'on the shelf' so to speak but I bet they might still have a copy.
ta7000 10y ago
what would be the most durable material to laser-engrave instead of clay?
- VLM 10y ago
  Solid gold bars. That or top quality stainless steel bars properly passivated and polished. The correct question is what material is near worthless and not usable as a construction brick that is none the less durable and laser engravable. Its going to be hard to beat clay bricks.
hanoz 10y ago
Notwithstanding it hasn't been a great few years for only destroyable by hammer artefacts.
Johnny555 10y ago
Kunze plans to distribute ceramic tokens around the world to everyone who either funds, contributes to, or advises on the project. Every 50 years, starting in 2070, he says, holders will meet to keep the memory of the capsule alive and to discuss if it needs to be reopened The problem with this is that if there are enough people around that remember about this and have the spare time and means to go there an dig an opening again, then it's probably not needed because society still exists. If a some global catastrophe happens that wipes out much of our our modern records and knowledge, then "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore.
- josephagoss 10y ago
  > "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore. I think that knowledge would become the new gold/buried treasure in such a world. They who have the knowledge wins, and it will become potentially far more valuable than any stash of Gold. If that is true for such a post apocalyptic future, then the lore of the buried treasure in the salt mine will probably spread and many will seek it out.
Udo 10y ago
I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling information in so it can only be used (ephemerally and in exchange for money) but not usefully retrieved and replicated elsewhere. It's "death by cloud". The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on being able to make many copies and modifications, too. People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when clearly the knowledge was almost there. My pet theory about this involves walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be truly accessible to a huge group of people. Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites. In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their data. If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your services as possible. Don't just use Spotify, have music on your hard drive. Don't just use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive. I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life, hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending supervolcano eruption.
javajosh 10y ago
Information is a linear ordering of shifting states. The most information dense substrate I can think of would be irregularities in a (perfect) crystal lattice, plus a convention regarding what path your scanner takes through that lattice. The problem is that future thinkers need to know it exists, and where to start. Both problems can be solved with a larger, more obvious medium. And in fact, you could have several mediums at different scales between big, billboard sized stuff and the ultimate substrate, and each level describes what you need to do to access the next level down. The billboard(100m) points out the library (1m) describes how to read the microfiche (1mm) describes how to build the TEM (1nm) which you use to read everything else. Of course, that might very well be far too much information. Certainly most of it will be useless to most observers - just like it is today. Well, we could do worse than just storing Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg, and YouTube. But I digress.
kazagistar 10y ago
In the excellent fictional work(s) of Humanity Has Declined, a failing and dwindling human race fritters away arguing over how to best implement a Human Monument to all their knowledge and achievements, rather then spending the resources to try to turn around the decline of civilization.
edem 10y ago
I've been to Hallstatt this summer. If you have time I recommend visiting the place. Next to it there is Königsee which is a UNESCO heritage site. Königsee itself is a tarn and you can literally drink from it. For this reason they only use electric and row boats to traverse the lake. I can't imagine a more suitable location for this burial despite the fact that the place is overlooked by Obersalzberg (Hitler's Eagle Nest).
dTal 10y ago
"All of human knowledge"? Let's think about maybe trying to collect that in the first place, before we worry about preservation. A vast amount of essential knowledge is locked away in oral traditions, expensive textbooks, and proprietary company processes. This is why I hate the meme that the the internet gives you access to "all of human knowledge" - it would be unimaginably, profoundly world-changing if it really did. "Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level." --yourapostasy [HN user] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828

129 points by randomerr 10y ago

This guy is on point. This era will be a black hole in history. I've worked in projects with archivists in a few US government entities --there's hardly anything for more recent administrations. Between easy deletion/loss of data and the difficulty of maintaining access to file formats over time, lots of stuff will vanish.

onion2k 10y ago
Clearly we don't capture or archive much of what's produced now, but that's not a new thing. There are very few records of things from more than a couple of hundred years ago. If you want to see anything that isn't the official government's (or monarch's) line there's much, much less. If you ignore digital media, and compare the number of physical books produced, there are many thousands of times more produced now than there were 500 years ago. You're right in the sense that a lot will be lost, and that we should strive to do better, but in terms of comparison to the past we're preserving an exceptional amount of knowledge.
nolok 10y ago
Not a blackhole compared to the rest of history. If anything, the ~100 years before this 'era' of temporary information that quickly disappears was the exception. We're just slowly reverting to how it was before.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kirykl 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/100yearsago/comments/5mlwch/jan_7_1917_editorial_cartoon_historian_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/100yearsago/comments/5mlwch/jan_7_1...
mustacheemperor 10y ago
A black hole relative to when? We're missing the other six parts of the Iliad epic. The play which beat Oedipus Rex at a Grecian theater festival has been lost forever. Incredibly minuscule amounts of recorded history have been preserved until recently.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  You can access the public and private papers of most US Presidents, for example. We have letters from US Civil War soldiers and immigrants that are important primary sources. My wife worked for a municipal water utility which possesses very old (early 19th century) records that shed light into how certain developments in the city's history progressed. Today that equivalent information is all electronic and most will be inaccessible in a decade or less. Getting insight into how people thought in the past will be harder for this era. Letters are replaced by electronic communication that is difficult to save and store casually. Things like annual reports are electronic only. Lost Greek works weren't lost because they weren't recorded. They were destroyed by the fall of that civilization and the wars and chaos that followed.
  - jjuel 10y ago
    So there won't be any wars or fall of civilizations anymore that could destroy even physical work? We are one crazy world leader from everything being bombed into oblivion. I don't think recording things physically is going to preserve anything in that case.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>This era will be a black hole in history. What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here. I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Civilization is fragile. We have the technology to make total war a suicide mission. But we have the hubris to destroy society from within.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  >I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago

ekidd 10y ago

The largest preservation effort along these lines—though not using ceramics—is probably the Internet Archive, which seals physcial materials into shipping containers. Some examples: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-books-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi... http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-internet-archive-continues-inform-serve-inspire/ http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-int... This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially) or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the hair of mummies for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy

Cyph0n 10y ago
> In 1974 Egyptologists visiting his tomb noticed that the mummy's condition was rapidly deteriorating and flew it to Paris for examination. Ramesses II was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as "King (deceased)". Humanity is simply amazing... we have come so far. A king who died ~3500 years ago was flown thousands of kilometers on a plane and was issued his own passport! > bury them in the North African desert How viable do you think would it be to setup a business that provides storage space and tracking capability in the Tunisian desert? I'm from Tunisia btw, and I think government seed funds would be happy to fund something like that. The biggest issue is who would actually pay for a service like that?
- ekidd 10y ago
  One big question in the minds of many customers might be political stability. Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct? Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two world wars. There's definitely a commericial market for storing paper documents for decades, maybe up to a century. This is currently addressed by existing mine-based storage companies, among other things. Plus mines are secure: There's often only one way in and the storage is surrounded by rock. Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something.

hashberry 10y ago

This is global doomsday level thinking. Reminds me of Y2K. And using clay? This seems very sentimental. Are there not more long-lasting mediums? Especially with laser printing where we can quickly engrave knowledge without the risk of human error or time-consuming manual labor.

woliveirajr 10y ago
> Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it’s emboldened by fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from earlier than 3000 B.C.E. Ceramic is very stable during time. All modern media that you might think (LP? tapes? Optical disks?) require some special instrument to recover the information, other than simply looking at it (perhaps using some microscope). Paper degrades. Plastic degrades, in general. Metals rust. But stones and ceramics tend to be very durable, including against microorganisms and chemicals. They just don't withstand mechanical forces, like a hammer. But anyone willing to use a hammer would use any other thing to destroy other medias, too.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Ceramic is too general a term. Clay in particular reacts very badly to fire and moderately badly to water (what matters for long time storage). Very few Sumerian tablets are still around, and most of them partially destructed. There are many better kinds of ceramic available, even glass would be a better choice.
  - woliveirajr 10y ago
    Yes, I wasn't taking "clay" by its literal term from the news, but thinking that being a ceramicist he would know how to make ceramics that last longer.
- jaddood 10y ago
  What happens to all this information if an earthquake happens, and that's probably even more of a concern when digging deeper. Don't you think?

f_allwein 10y ago

makes you wonder what future generations/ alien visitors will think of us when they discover it. I bet they'd be amazed/ puzzled.

SonicSoul 10y ago
they'll most likely see us as primitive. but they will be grateful for the pain we endured to let humanity continue to the next evolutionary step. Sort of like how we look at Neanderthals today.
ahartman00 10y ago
im sure it will be just like hieroglyphics. we know it means something, but we dont know what.

bprasanna 10y ago

Good to see an effort in a right direction. Though i feel like boasting about my post, this post https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-security/ https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-security/ was written 8 years back!!!

13of40 10y ago

Besides making the information last 10,000 years, I think another challenge is coming up with a way of indexing that much data so that you can meaningfully search through it without a computer. Something like a combination of a concordance and a card catalog, with some kind of redundancy built. Another interesting thing to ponder is whether you could structure it so there are basic pieces of knowledge, like guidance for developing computing, so they can index the rest of the thing and search it programmatically. I reckon we might be too far removed from our roots to do a good job at that, though...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

freddy5 10y ago

Or you know, launch it into geostationary orbit or medium earth orbit[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule

ablation 10y ago
I was mulling on something similar the other day, except I was thinking that it might be sent to a Lagrange point. Might be more stable/less in harms way?

felipemnoa 10y ago

I wonder if instead we could encode this information in a metal that does not corrode, like gold. Unfortunately gold is also a precious metal. Silver or copper are good candidates too. The transcription of data could be done with a laser in microprint. The data could also be encoded similar to how we encode dvds but instead of just etching a tiny mark a partial hole could be punched half way through for every ON bit. This way the data would be less susceptible to scratches. Make the disc 1 centimeter thick and the holes .5 centimeters deep. This way it would take a lot to destroy the data. A simple scratch would not do it. Anybody with a microscope and the knowledge of binary would be able to decode this. The instructions could be printed on the other side in microprint That could be read with a microscope. Books and scientific journals could be the first to be encoded. Reputable newspapers could be next. Maybe the entire library of congress. Social media data can be encoded dead last or not at all since it would not help in rebuilding a civilization. We do not need to encode every tweet.

mitchtbaum 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- felipemnoa 10y ago
  Cool! Didn't know about this. This is definitely a start.

chiph 10y ago

While encoding this onto 1mm ceramic sheets is impressive, if it is to survive a fall of civilization, it needs to be immediately obvious that it has readable and useful text and not depend on a 10x magnifying glass. So they probably ought to be Sumerian tablet-sized.

Animats 10y ago

There was a US project in the 1950s, as part of Civil Defense, to put all the information needed to rebuild industrial society on microfiche. Copies, along with microfiche viewers that worked in sunlight, without power, were put in major fallout shelters. Try to find one of those today.

6stringmerc 10y ago
A University I attended had fallout shelters in at least one of its major campus libraries (also a National Archive IIRC). Might not be 'on the shelf' so to speak but I bet they might still have a copy.

ta7000 10y ago

what would be the most durable material to laser-engrave instead of clay?

VLM 10y ago
Solid gold bars. That or top quality stainless steel bars properly passivated and polished. The correct question is what material is near worthless and not usable as a construction brick that is none the less durable and laser engravable. Its going to be hard to beat clay bricks.

hanoz 10y ago

Notwithstanding it hasn't been a great few years for only destroyable by hammer artefacts.

Johnny555 10y ago

Kunze plans to distribute ceramic tokens around the world to everyone who either funds, contributes to, or advises on the project. Every 50 years, starting in 2070, he says, holders will meet to keep the memory of the capsule alive and to discuss if it needs to be reopened The problem with this is that if there are enough people around that remember about this and have the spare time and means to go there an dig an opening again, then it's probably not needed because society still exists. If a some global catastrophe happens that wipes out much of our our modern records and knowledge, then "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore.

josephagoss 10y ago
> "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore. I think that knowledge would become the new gold/buried treasure in such a world. They who have the knowledge wins, and it will become potentially far more valuable than any stash of Gold. If that is true for such a post apocalyptic future, then the lore of the buried treasure in the salt mine will probably spread and many will seek it out.

Udo 10y ago

I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling information in so it can only be used (ephemerally and in exchange for money) but not usefully retrieved and replicated elsewhere. It's "death by cloud". The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on being able to make many copies and modifications, too. People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when clearly the knowledge was almost there. My pet theory about this involves walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be truly accessible to a huge group of people. Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites. In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their data. If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your services as possible. Don't just use Spotify, have music on your hard drive. Don't just use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive. I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life, hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending supervolcano eruption.

javajosh 10y ago

Information is a linear ordering of shifting states. The most information dense substrate I can think of would be irregularities in a (perfect) crystal lattice, plus a convention regarding what path your scanner takes through that lattice. The problem is that future thinkers need to know it exists, and where to start. Both problems can be solved with a larger, more obvious medium. And in fact, you could have several mediums at different scales between big, billboard sized stuff and the ultimate substrate, and each level describes what you need to do to access the next level down. The billboard(100m) points out the library (1m) describes how to read the microfiche (1mm) describes how to build the TEM (1nm) which you use to read everything else. Of course, that might very well be far too much information. Certainly most of it will be useless to most observers - just like it is today. Well, we could do worse than just storing Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg, and YouTube. But I digress.

kazagistar 10y ago

In the excellent fictional work(s) of Humanity Has Declined, a failing and dwindling human race fritters away arguing over how to best implement a Human Monument to all their knowledge and achievements, rather then spending the resources to try to turn around the decline of civilization.

edem 10y ago

I've been to Hallstatt this summer. If you have time I recommend visiting the place. Next to it there is Königsee which is a UNESCO heritage site. Königsee itself is a tarn and you can literally drink from it. For this reason they only use electric and row boats to traverse the lake. I can't imagine a more suitable location for this burial despite the fact that the place is overlooked by Obersalzberg (Hitler's Eagle Nest).

dTal 10y ago

"All of human knowledge"? Let's think about maybe trying to collect that in the first place, before we worry about preservation. A vast amount of essential knowledge is locked away in oral traditions, expensive textbooks, and proprietary company processes. This is why I hate the meme that the the internet gives you access to "all of human knowledge" - it would be unimaginably, profoundly world-changing if it really did. "Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level." --yourapostasy [HN user] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828