Here’s a cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph
No small societies have lasted 10,000 years. Rock carving has a proven track record for preserving information for the long term. Other high tech methods might work but it will take 10,000 years to demonstrate their reliability.
Carvings on the tops of mountains? Cite?
I don’t get why people are making arguments using what the currently longest lasting info is. You know why cave painting have lasted longer than etching shit in metal and sealing it in a mountain vault? There hasn’t been that technology for tens of thousands of years!
OK:
I think mountains are an excellent place to carve the message because they are hard to move. Loose objects tend to end up buried in a landfill.
I concede the message doesn’t have to be on the top of a mountain. I thought putting it on a mountain top would indicate the message’s importance and keep it out of harm’s way.
so… the final Dope decree is that: you simply create a society on a flat plain on the moon, then make a platinum disc and put a mountain on top.
(but note the mysterious absence of a treadmill…)
I believe a strand of human DNA is about 3GB of info on it (I’m not sure since DNA has 4 base pairs but binary is 0 and 1, so maybe 6GB).
Either way, 3-6GB is not a lot of info. Most MP3 players and thumb drives have more than that.
Storing info in some kind of substrate that can replicate itself and look out for its own survival is probably paramount though. Human culture as an example is self replicating and ensures its own survival. Storage devices do not. Even if you do store them in formats that can last a long time (carve them into rock, etc) you can’t store anywhere near enough data to make it worth it.
I don’t know if there are any self repairing data storage systems that also replicate themselves outside of biology and culture.
It’s easy. Just pick any medium but make sure you are drunk and topless in it. You’ll never be able to get rid of it!
In Nevelle Shute’s “On The Beach”, people are watching most of any complex life on earth die, in short order. Some of them decide to take pages of various books and place them between glass, and stack those in a sealed cave. If you upped the ante on this slightly, by placing the glass/paper (use low lignen paper, nutral buffered paper) sandwiches in a waterproof, corrosion resistant box, coated that in a polyresin plastic, and then put that in another corosion resistant box, you would have something that would coast through the eons with very little degradation.
Your hardest part would be finding a geologically stable place to put it, as ice ages tend to crush things, and I don’t think we have (as a civilization) the technological cohones to resist the pressure of a mile high sheet of ice slowly grinding along, using house sized boluders as ball bearings.
I suggest the (ice age resistant) equator. If the budget of your project allow, I volunteer for the arduious and important task of scouting out possible tropical/equatorial climes that are suitable for consideration. 5-10 yrs should do it. As an added bonus, I can allow for continental plate subduction, at no extra charge. If your package doe’sn’t last at least 500,000 years in readable form, I will happily refund all your investment.
Regards
FML
How long can he keep things in orbit around the Earth?
Perhaps they deliberately chose nickel for the Rosetta Disk because the etching process requires them to expose it to acid?
If your disc is on the Moon, you don’t need gold or platinum. Any metal is okay in hard vacuum…
Personally I’d use a disc of fired ceramic or even specialised glass. Glass can be laser-etched or acid etched with hydrofluoric, and current microchip technology means we can write on it at the micron level quite easily. And no, it won’t “flow” and lose the detail. Volcanic glass tools have preserved their microscopically sharp edges for tens of thousands of years.
Try mineral paper:
Yes, that can be recycled, but if it is kept indoors it would last even longer than regular paper, IIUK there are even companies that can make mineral paper that is not biodegradable so one can have paper that would last as long as the cuneiform tablets.
deleted
Accepting thenbet was a joke. There’s no way I could ever pay up, so it’s irrelevant.
Besides, my reasoning is simple – erosion, plate tectonics and wars don’t happen on the moon… not yet at least.
The reason we have preserved cave paintings isnt because cave paintings are durable, it’s because there were a lot of them. Had that cave flooded they’d be gone, and most caves flood periodically.
What it really comes down to, though, is how important is the information that needs to be preserved? And can anyone know this, or is it secret? By far the best way to preserve information is to spread it as far and wide as possible.
Pretend the cave paintings mentioned earlier were information, let’s say we’ve found a thousand of them over the years (I don’t have any idea how many 10,000+ year old paintings we’ve found, maybe more, maybe less). If they’re so delicate, how do we have so many? There have probably been ten million of them. Not all in caves, many probably on the sides of cliffs… But those were destroyed or lost. The people making them had no idea what would be best, they just put their shit everywhere and didn’t even hope for the best.
I say, we just smear our shit on every wall we can find and hope something still stinks in a few millennium.
Understood.
Note the OP specified a preference for earth-based storage but I agree the moon is a good possibility.
Yes, the more copies of the message that you have, the more likely that at least one copy will survive. This is why I suggested carving the message into multiple mountains.
But a bunch of meteors/meteorites/ comets hits the moon surface very often, so you’d have to build a big dome over the tablet/ disc.
you could do that, but it’d be easier to drill down into the surface of the moon. Say, a quarter mile or so, and leave a very distinct mineral pattern (maybe a leave a large void, with a few hundred tones of purified ore arranged in a spiral pattern, so anyone with sufficient technology to scan into the surface of a planet/moon could see it. (we currently can scan a few meters down via sonar, so that’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility).
The moon does violate some of the OPs principles, but since earth based storage is only preferred, and moon based storage is so very much more effective, at least due to erosion… I’d definitely keep some copies on Earth, if it was important enough information I’d plaster it all over the solar system if possible.
Launch a few probes specially designed to the moon, mercury, some of the Jovian moons, etc. Launch a few under water buoyant markers with the information, etc. And then make it a law that it has to be tattooed on all people at the age of 22.
I started a similar thread a year or so ago. One thing pointed out about DNA storage is that it would be evolved away. Even if not, a future civilization would have to get to a high level of technology to be able to read it - and it may never occur to them to look for the message.
I think the key to longevity is having a lot of copies spread around the world. And since we have more information to preserve than just what kind of game we like to hunt, the “books” should be densely written and cheap to produce.
I like the Rosetta disk format of shrinking text, but I wouldn’t shrink below the point where the print couldn’t be read with hand-made glass lenses. The 2000 year lifespan is too short; there must be longer lasting material that can be finely etched. It shouldn’t be metal; metal is useful and our descendants may end up beating the disks into spearheads instead of trying to read the text. How long would silicon wafers last if they were coated in oxide?
What about making the text increasingly smaller, with the intent that the smaller the text, the more advanced the technology.
How to build an A-bomb, for instance, should probably be buried in the ultra fine print, where how to purify water, make penicillin and the concepts of the scientific method could be right on the index.
Wasn’t this a Star Trek episode? I think some scientist/archeologist told Picard about finding a buried message on the DNA of several species. Apparently some alien civilization seeded various worlds with their genetic material (which explained why there were so many humanoid races), and embedded a message in the DNA structure.
I think it was a brief hello and please help each other out since you’re all related to each other through us.
'course Klingons were gonna have none of that and started blasting.
But DNA is ultimately fungible. Although you can embed it in the apparently functionless nucleotide sequences, this may interfere with replication, and you would have to have numerous alleles so that historians can make a statistical analysis to figure out the original message.
I personally prefer to store my most important work as references to the appropriate string of digits within a transcendental number. For instance, I once embedded the entire text of King Lear in Gelfond’s Constant. I won’t tell you where to start looking, but I will say it is somewhere after 10[sup]31[/sup] digits. I once stored a critical term paper in an Einstein-Bose condensate matrix, but it collapsed into randomness when I accidentally spilled a cup of tea on it.
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