3 ms·

You have to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims they are doing something for the good of humanity but then gates their tech behind a patent.

xeyownt 3y ago
That's a tradeoff, 20 years protection vs 50 000 000 years protection.
- amtamt 3y ago
  > For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets?
  - nielsbot 3y ago
    Guess you could include instructions for building the right gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets? ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI assumption. But it's not -that- exotic. A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron, resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible. My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50 and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably read, with difficulty, 12pt text.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    it just needs analog magnification, so very achievable. i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being encased with it?
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Biological factors are pretty unlikely to be a concern on the moon :)
      - seanhunter 3y ago
        I think the problem with the moon as a storage location is getting the archive to the moon in good shape and then retrieving it to recover the knowledge post whatever cataclysm caused all the primary sources to be lost. On their website they even say the archive is "believed to be on the surface of the moon". So maybe they have saved human knowledge and maybe they haven't and somehow post apocalypse people just have to figure out how to get to the moon and maybe it will be there waiting for them. Doesn't seem tremendously reassuring.
      - jiveturkey 3y ago
        Space fungus is a thing. https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronaut-missions https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronau... > In 1988, astronauts aboard the now-retired Russian space station Mir realized that something had blanketed one of their windows — from the outside. [...] This fungi had managed to adapt to the space environment, and so well that it not only survived but thrived on windows, control panels, air conditioners and cable insulators. It even contaminated the crew's precious food and water supply. Not a one-time event.
        lxgr 3y ago
        The ISS goes to great lengths to support life in space – it's just hard to be selective about which types of life. So unless the nanofiches are somehow stuck to the heat exchanger of a secret lunar base or similar, I'd assume that they would go biologically inert (or at least dormant) very quickly.
devjab 3y ago
I find this to be an odd take on a VC forum. It’s obviously marketing and mission branding, which is only natural in an age where we as employees flock to noble missions. I work in an investment bank as an example, but our investments go into building/running/improving green energy plants, so while our main mission is to make investors richer we do it by building a better world. I’m not sure I would’ve marketed it exactly this way. But this is because I spent almost a decade in the Danish public sector and I know how revolutionary long term storage will be for public recording. Right now we spent a very high amount of resources on the maintenance of data records that are rarely accessed but are important to public history, accountability and many social sciences. If you could sell those recording organisations a medium that didn’t need near constant maintaining it would free up a lot of resources. Still, maybe it’s a good choice for a company mission considering my earlier points as this tech will essentially sell itself. If it works as well as it’s sold in this article. In the content of hacker news, however, why wouldn’t you expect this to be meant to make its investors money?
- seanhunter 3y ago
  I don't expect it to make its investors money because most VC-style startups don't make money and also because it seems to me to be kind of a dumb idea for a few reasons. 1)Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think their IP has any kind of protectable moat. I really can't see that patent surviving any sort of challenge. So if tehy figure out a business model that works it will get cloned cheaper. 2)It's an actuarial fact that people overpay for insurance relative to expectation but here they are essentially selling a partial mitigation for a very high severity very low probability event[1]. So the expectation is very low and is highly subject to model calibration error. Potential customers are not going to value this well and I don't see people paying them enough to stay in business. I could easily be wrong about both of those things. I know about selling the mission "Making the world a better place with extensible mobile, social, local middleware APIs" etc as I think the TV show "Silicon Valley" parodied it. Just in this case I dont' really see either the mission or the commercial reality making much sense. It's interesting that the board of advisors has Ben "I'm gonna bring the mammoth back to life" Lamm and David "Make the statue of Liberty disappear" Copperfield on it. So they've got Barnum and Bailey going for them at least. [1] "I'm selling you a backup that would survive even if humanity gets wiped out" isn't a business proposition. Noone cares about what their backups do under those circumstances so they won't pay for it.
throwaway81523 3y ago
Plus I thought stuff like that was done decades ago. There was a place you could send your docs to be microscopically engraved on a nickel disc. This goes back to 1995 or so: https://rosettaproject.org/ https://rosettaproject.org/

xeyownt 3y ago

That's a tradeoff, 20 years protection vs 50 000 000 years protection.

amtamt 3y ago
> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets?
- nielsbot 3y ago
  Guess you could include instructions for building the right gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)
- mlyle 3y ago
  > How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets? ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI assumption. But it's not -that- exotic. A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron, resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible. My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50 and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably read, with difficulty, 12pt text.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  it just needs analog magnification, so very achievable. i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being encased with it?
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Biological factors are pretty unlikely to be a concern on the moon :)
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      I think the problem with the moon as a storage location is getting the archive to the moon in good shape and then retrieving it to recover the knowledge post whatever cataclysm caused all the primary sources to be lost. On their website they even say the archive is "believed to be on the surface of the moon". So maybe they have saved human knowledge and maybe they haven't and somehow post apocalypse people just have to figure out how to get to the moon and maybe it will be there waiting for them. Doesn't seem tremendously reassuring.
    - jiveturkey 3y ago
      Space fungus is a thing. https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronaut-missions https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronau... > In 1988, astronauts aboard the now-retired Russian space station Mir realized that something had blanketed one of their windows — from the outside. [...] This fungi had managed to adapt to the space environment, and so well that it not only survived but thrived on windows, control panels, air conditioners and cable insulators. It even contaminated the crew's precious food and water supply. Not a one-time event.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        The ISS goes to great lengths to support life in space – it's just hard to be selective about which types of life. So unless the nanofiches are somehow stuck to the heat exchanger of a secret lunar base or similar, I'd assume that they would go biologically inert (or at least dormant) very quickly.

devjab 3y ago

I find this to be an odd take on a VC forum. It’s obviously marketing and mission branding, which is only natural in an age where we as employees flock to noble missions. I work in an investment bank as an example, but our investments go into building/running/improving green energy plants, so while our main mission is to make investors richer we do it by building a better world. I’m not sure I would’ve marketed it exactly this way. But this is because I spent almost a decade in the Danish public sector and I know how revolutionary long term storage will be for public recording. Right now we spent a very high amount of resources on the maintenance of data records that are rarely accessed but are important to public history, accountability and many social sciences. If you could sell those recording organisations a medium that didn’t need near constant maintaining it would free up a lot of resources. Still, maybe it’s a good choice for a company mission considering my earlier points as this tech will essentially sell itself. If it works as well as it’s sold in this article. In the content of hacker news, however, why wouldn’t you expect this to be meant to make its investors money?

seanhunter 3y ago
I don't expect it to make its investors money because most VC-style startups don't make money and also because it seems to me to be kind of a dumb idea for a few reasons. 1)Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think their IP has any kind of protectable moat. I really can't see that patent surviving any sort of challenge. So if tehy figure out a business model that works it will get cloned cheaper. 2)It's an actuarial fact that people overpay for insurance relative to expectation but here they are essentially selling a partial mitigation for a very high severity very low probability event[1]. So the expectation is very low and is highly subject to model calibration error. Potential customers are not going to value this well and I don't see people paying them enough to stay in business. I could easily be wrong about both of those things. I know about selling the mission "Making the world a better place with extensible mobile, social, local middleware APIs" etc as I think the TV show "Silicon Valley" parodied it. Just in this case I dont' really see either the mission or the commercial reality making much sense. It's interesting that the board of advisors has Ben "I'm gonna bring the mammoth back to life" Lamm and David "Make the statue of Liberty disappear" Copperfield on it. So they've got Barnum and Bailey going for them at least. [1] "I'm selling you a backup that would survive even if humanity gets wiped out" isn't a business proposition. Noone cares about what their backups do under those circumstances so they won't pay for it.

throwaway81523 3y ago

Plus I thought stuff like that was done decades ago. There was a place you could send your docs to be microscopically engraved on a nickel disc. This goes back to 1995 or so: https://rosettaproject.org/ https://rosettaproject.org/