96 ms·

It’s not about efficiency, think how many years a hard drive will last? 3 years. How many years a gold plate will last? thousands of years. Least reactive metal

• ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  If there is an ion blast sufficient to wipe all electronic storage devices on earth, won't the associated radiation also be fatal to a large percentage of the population?
  • throwawaytemp27 5y ago
    No. People are more resilient than electronic storage media.
  • valyagolev 5y ago
    even if not, if all the electronics suddenly stopped a sizeable chunk of the population will die immediately or in a bit… i wonder how many safety protocols for objects with huge blast radius are dependent on electronics running continuously
• krisoft 5y ago
  > How many years a gold plate will last? A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.
  • kamray23 5y ago
    It isn't a gold plate. It advertises itself as solid gold. It is in fact solid nickel, with 200-400 mg of gold peppered in. It's also at most 6.4 x 12.8 cm plate, which is tiny. If it were solid gold at 19.3 g/cm^3, it would have a thickness of 2.6 µm which is thin compared to your approx. 50 µm human hair. It is not, and therefore it is not solid gold.