Suppose I want to make a book that will last a million years. That is, readable by the Mk 1 eyeball in 1 million years’ time. It’s got to be not only durable but reasonably disaster-proof. Say survive a library fire and being sunk at sea for a short period. And it’s got to remain here on Earth for the whole time, so no shooting it into space to return in a million years’ time!
First, the ‘paper’: actual paper won’t last, of course, and vellum won’t last long enough either. Which material would be most suitable? Glass is fragile; iron / steel will rust. It’s got to be inert and not poisonous. How about nickel or aluminium? Gold seems the obvious choice but it’s fragile, and being valuable in itself, my opus could be melted down for scrap. Plus it might not survive a hotter fire. Besides, I’m a cheapskate.
Next is the ink. Is there a suitable ink or will I have to emboss each letter? (That would mean printing on one side only, doubling the page count.) Are coloured images possible?
How about the form? Is the book form actually reasonable or would a scroll or some other form work better?
Gold, lettering and illustrations engraved in and I would probably go more scroll than book. Other than gold I would say maybe a chromium stainless steel alloy; possibly a bronze if you wanted to work on the cheap. I think though a million years is kinda extreme; shoot for 20,000 years and hope you get lucky on the level of a Dead Sea Scrolls author.
Copper solves a lot of the expense problems of gold and really the only downside would be it oxidizing but you could emboss it and it would still be readable through that. The language you pick would probably be a bigger hurdle then the text itself.
Really? A million years of oxidation will do a lot of damage to copper, won’t it? I think something that doesn’t rust - or, like aluminium, forms an impermeable layer of rust that does not progress - would be a better choice.
As mentioned above, I think the language is going to be as important as the material you choose. You’ll almost certainly have to do some sort of Rosetta Stone type of thing. Give as many clues as possible so whoever finds it will be able decipher it. Otherwise it’s nothing more than a paperweight.
I’m not sure that anyone can offer a suggestion and reasonably say it will last for 1M years. The only way around that that I can see is to take the top 50 suggestions and then make millions of copies from each.
Still no guarantee, but it may give you a fighting chance. I just don’t see a one off book having a realistic chance of lasting 1M years.
Amber has survived tens of millions of years. Though I’m sure only the best quality amber - right tree sap composition, right conditions for curing, right environment for preservation - have survived.
Still, I think encasing the engraved surface with transparent material is a good way to preserve information. Perhaps an etched stainless sheet coated with a thick layer of epoxy. Though that may not survive an actual fire…
Dude, you’d think with your username it would be obvious.
You don’t want metal of any sort, because that’s going to be scavenged and melted down. You want rocks. Engrave the pages of your book onto cubic granite blocks, and stack them in the desert somewhere. If the local people use your free stone blocks for construction, so much the better. That’s how the Rosetta Stone was recovered. When the blocks are re-used they’re going to be re-used as stone blocks, not reworked.
I’d recommend 5 pages per side, plus one page of a much simpler language/alphabet primer on the sixth side. Since you want this to last, you need redundancy, engrave each page multiple times. And mix it up, you don’t want 100 copies of page 1-5, 100 copies of 6-10, 100 copies of 11-15, and so on. Each side is going to be random, to minimize the odds that every copy of a particular page turns up missing in 1,000,000 years.
We have lots of stone inscriptions from Egypt that have lasted 6,000 years. Now, 6,000 is a lot smaller than 1,000,000, but that sort of thing is your best bet. Erosion is a problem, so make your storage site somewhere geologically and hydrologically stable. You want some place that’s going to stay a desert a million years from now, so get to work on those climate models. An ice age or two could really mess up your plans, because a glacier could grind those blocks to powder.
I like this. But I also like the millions of copies idea. So let’s make this a wall. It’s an interior wall in a church. The church is one you’ve created to protect the message and adherents must make copies of the message and spread it.
I’d say locate the church away from seismic instabilities, but over a million years that will change. The church will need a big trust fund, so I’d start on that first.
Nothing stone is going to last a million years. Besides, they can be torn up and re-used, as you can see from archeological digs in the middle east where stones from previous monuments are used to build new ones, sometimes defaced in the process.
And anything else can be melted down, worn down, corroded or lost, so you can never bet that something won’t be over a million years.
Your best bet is still gold sheets, since they will not corrode.
Or, you know, crystal skulls with a holographic memory matrix inside created by lasers.
It’s a little odd you reject stones because they can be torn up and re-used for other things, and then suggest gold sheets as though people are likely to say, “Meh, gold. What possible reason could we have to melt and reuse that?”
