How do I make a book that will last a million years?

So, how long will sheets made of nickel or aluminium last?

Under what circumstances? Both nickel and aluminum are recyclable and on top of that nickel is apparently getting a bit scarce. The discussion seems to have turned to concerns about later people actively destroying your archive, and this would definitely be a concern with sheets of pure metal.

I’m thinking that glass just might be your best bet. Yes, it’ll shatter if dropped or struck, but glass is remarkably resistant to just about anything else. And you can mitigate the impact problem by storing them in the bottom of a large body of water.

Hmm… A large body of water which will remain intact for a million years. That part might be difficult.

Also, how difficult do you want it to be to recover this thing? Things will last a lot longer in space (whether on the surface of an airless world, or just in a high, out-of-the-way orbit), and they’ll be a lot less subject to casual looting.

I wasn’t actually kidding about carving in giant letters on the moon - to the degree that I actually pondered about how well the carvings would survive a million years of meteor impacts unimpeded by atmosphere. (My uninformed speculation resolved with ‘if the letters are big enough it’ll probably be okay.’)

Obviously an approach like this assumes money will be no object.

Curses! Foiled again! :slight_smile:

How long do fossils exposed to weather last? :dubious:

I thought I stated quite clearly that ANY material could be recycled and that you cannot possibly plan around that.

I think gold is more likely to be recycled than any other material.

Of course you can plan around that. It just requires you to do one (or both) of two things: establish your object has having extreme societal value such that later civilizations will (probably) protect it as an important historical artifact, or make it really, really inaccessible so people can’t get to it at all.

The former approach is unreliable, but had worked okay for a (very, very) small number of historical works so far, such as ones which have been transferred to museums that actively work to preserve them.

The latter approach is better. Step one: buy a played out mine. Step two: put your thing in the played out mine. Step three: collapse the mine. Step four: explode a dirty bomb over the mine.

That ought to keep people away.

(Firing it into space (or carving it on the moon) would be even better, but on review of the OP space is out of bounds. So what can’t go up must go down.)

Here’s the solution: Hide the book so no one can find it. But first, commission some sort of eternal being - let’s call it an angel - to protect the location and only reveal the book to someone deserving of the privilege. Make sure the angel requires the person to follow all sorts of wacky rules in order to see the book. Then your descendants can write a musical about the whole thing and make a fortune…

My understanding is that once copper oxidizes then unless that layer is disturbed the process stops. Now I’m not the metallurgist in the family so I wouldn’t swear to it but I work with a lot of copper and generally, it takes acidity to eat away at the oxidation and wear the copper away.

Nah, I want it to be read throughout that million years.

Then the problem isn’t one of materials at all - it’s one of interest. Very few works have captured the public imagination to be read even hundreds of years later, much less thousands or millions - you’ll have to write something really seminal or people are going to just stop caring and forget about it.

So my suggestion: start a religion with your work as its holy book.

Note that one major upside of this approach is that in addition to longevity through multiple copies existing, you also avoid problems of the language changing out from under your work because it would presumably be (badly) translated by your followers into successive languages as needed.

Encode it in DNA and insert it in the genome of a species that’s unlikely to die out. In long-generation-time animals, the mutation rate is extremely low, something like 10^-9 per year in humans, so you’d only have about 1 error per 1000 bases in a million years. And error correction by inserting a few repeat copies would easily overcome slightly higher mutation rates in smaller animals. Bacteria wouldn’t work because their genome is too streamlined. Cockroaches?

You’d want to spread it as widely as possible, of course. Consult an ecologist for that. Presumably you’d want to try to wipe out the wild type population across a large area and repopulate with your engineered version. Ideally you’d want to do it several times in several places around the world and across several species to be sure that something survived.

If intelligent life is still around at all in a million years, it will almost certainly be highly advanced, and sequencing everything it encounters will be routine. If whoever is living on earth in a million years can’t sequence DNA, it’s unlikely they can figure out a dead language in any format.

A thick pane of glass is fairly unlikely to break. Especially if it’s made of a special variety–maybe something along the lines of original Pyrex.

Oh, that’s easy, then. Make the last page say something along the lines of: *“Make ten copies of this manuscript and distribute them among ten people who can be relied on to read it. If you fail to do so, catastrophe will befall you and your loved ones. Compliance will result in the acquisition of untold riches for you and your kin.

“In St. Louis MO, a man accidentally dropped his copy in the Mississippi River. Rather than attempt to retrieve it, he went about his day. That evening a Delta Airlines Boeing 757 had an engine fall off as it was approaching St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The engine crashed through the roof of his house as he and his family were sitting down to dinner, killing every one of them.

“His next-door neighbor had received the same MS, and had read, copied, and distributed it within a week. He and each member of his family won a $500M Powerball jackpot over the course of the following year.”*

Put it in an iPhone. That will be version 2236 by then.

(not really joking. Go digital. It will survive.)

Put an illustration in it of the sky with an extra planet drawn in. Make it last several hundred years, someplace on a remote island. An unending series of Eric Von Dannikens and Discovery Channels will keep finding it and reprinting it for a million years.

I thought it was a given that the “book” will at least be buried or stored in shelter. No substance will last a million years if exposed to weather.

Well, stored in a library or museum or such like. Though I want to ensure that my book will survive short-term mishaps. So, being out in the rain, or accidentally dropped into a river, survive a library fire (I’m assuming the fire brigade will be enthusiastic in their application of water), survive a short submersion in salt water, smoke damage, and such like.