I want a nice, secure final resting place. I think a 20’20’ interior space will be adequate (I want my cars with me).
In planning this, I want the place to last 100,000 years. My first thought was an underground vault-but that is pretty cheerless. So, I was thinking along these lines:
-12’ walls, floor, and roof of reinforced concrete
-cover with 1" thick aluminum panels (welded seams)
-plated with pure gold
The doors would be similar to bank vault doors, with a time lock
Should I plan on having windows, perhaps bulletproof glass?
Will this construction keep me intact for 100 millenia?
Or is an underground place the best option?
There’s no way anything plated with pure gold will last 100 years, let alone 100,000 years. It will be looted.
Forget reinforced concrete. Eventually it will crack and the rebar will rust and the whole thing will fall apart. I doubt that will last 1000 years either.
Nothing mechanical will still work after 1000 years either. Forget the time lock and the doors.
Your best bet is probably thick slabs of solid granite fitted so they stay together without mortar. Locate it in a remote, seismically inactive desert. After a few hundred years the sand will cover it over and everyone will forget about it and you can wait out the millenia.
Of course, almost nothing you could put inside (including your body) will last 100,000 years anyway … .
A ziploc baggie on the moon.
You are going to have to go underground and hide it well. Otherwise, someone of something is going to mess with you at some point. The famous tombs in Egypt are only a fraction of that age and they started to get looted as soon as they were built and that continues on to this day. I don’t think the pyramids themselves would even do all that well after 100,000 years. They still look pretty good but they are quite worn compared to what they once were. They used to be smooth and gleaming when they were built.
Your best bet would be to build some type of structure out of pure titanium I think. I wouldn’t be cheap but it won’t corrode much either. If you put that in a geologically stable cavern deep underground, it would last for a very long time although the battery and tires on the car wouldn’t be worth a damn in just a few years.
Sounds like you want to be down a salt mine or on the moon. That will take care of all corrosion problems.
For construction materials, you likely want a piece of solid rock, hollowed out.
Electroplated metal isn’t going to be a problem, nor would covering the inside - or outside - with gold leaf.
For your time-lock to work after 100K years you’re going to have to work with radioactive decay. Extreme simplicity is going to be required. Maybe a restraining bolt decays sufficiently that the door falls open?
The big problem isn’t wear and tear, it’s human activities, from theft to inadvertant destruction. Mine, moon, bottom of the sea, drill a hole in the ice cap and set up shop at the bottom. Of course you don’t want to get stuck is a subduction zone, or scraped into the sea by a glacier, or anything along those lines. reinforced concrete isn’t a good idea, either.
I’d suggest, if you can’t get to the moon, a remote spot in the mountains, maybe in Chile, maybe the Urals, certainly somewhere there aren’t many people. Build yourself a dome, maybe of granite or possibly alumino-silicate concrete. Cover it with some sort of anti-corrosion metal, stainless steel, zinc, something like that. Then bury it in soil. I can’ tthink of any way to set up a timer though. Justy have to hope one day someone digs it up.
Let’s take a cue from nature and find structures that are at least 100,000 years old. Some mountains and rock formations are millions of years old. If they’ve stood the test of time for that long, surely they will easily last 100k more years as you require.
A good example is Ayers Rock
It’s basically a huge single rock that was formed about 500 million years ago. On Earth, I don’t think you can get much more structurally sound than that.
So, I suggest carving out a a hole to the center to house your remains, and plugging it back with the piece we carved out.
If this rock is too ugly to meet your definition of a mausoleum, you can have a team of your admirers polish down the rock to something more pretty.
You could have a giant diamond synthesized around you and shot into space.
<SLAPS UncleRojelio with a Wet Trout>
Micrometeorites will eventually wear him away.
Lunar cave. That’s the ticket.
Cautionary tale re buried concrete vaults.
1957 Plymouth Belvedere Unearthed After 50 Years Still Turns Heads, But Not The Way You’d Think