So I want civilization to never collapse, and I come up with $50B by robbing Bill Gates. I plan to produce large (16’x9’x3’) blocks of some substance, inscribe an encyclopedia, and scatter them around the world, so that even in a mass die off we don’t lose the secret of concrete or gears or stuff. Or that if we all die, our human story would survive embedded in the crust all over the world for as long as the earths crust lasts. So what should I make these blocks out of? Let’s restrict ourselves to stuff that could feasibly be built with the budget above by the end of this decade.
Obviously I could go the ancient way and use marble, since lots of ancient marble inscriptions survive, but it won’t last long enough, and is too easy to repurpose. I’d guess diamond would be a good option, and it’s been used as such in some sci-fi stories, but AFAIK we don’t currently have the ability to produce a block of said size. Would diamond be the best option if we could? Assuming it’s out, I’m guessing some form of metal. It’d have to have an insanely high melting point, as to not be melted down and reused. Some titanium alloy maybe? So dopers, how what should we use to make sure ignorance stays fought?
The Rosetta Project. I believe it’s mainly funded by Bezos, not Gates. They’re using nickel. Preserving the language is just as difficult as preserving the physical item.
Well, I can see a problem right here. Monoliths are required to have the lengths of their sides in a ratio of 1:4:9. Other ratios just won’t work.
As for a substance, perhaps something coated in diamond would work. But diamond may not be the best anyway. Diamonds break if you hit them the right way, so I’d expect people to do that if your monoliths were made of solid diamond. And possibly even for a diamond coating, although they wouldn’t get much more than a good abbrasive from that.
Awesome thanks for the link. I’d assume it’d be topped off with some self-deciphering SETI-type signal. And as cool as this is, I doubt it’d be readable after 1000 years in a moderately weathered area, but maybe I’m wrong?
And if diamonds are good against erosion but might collapse to human interference, what gives us the best against both?
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As for a substance, perhaps something coated in diamond would work. But diamond may not be the best anyway. Diamonds break if you hit them the right way
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More importantly, diamond burns. So, the first forest fire is going to destroy the coating.
Well, most plastics are badly degraded by UV, but Teflon is pretty impervious to UV, and of course it’s almost inert, so it won’t bio-degrade. But, it’s really soft.
Don’t think big, think small. Don’t make one huge monolith; make thousands of small tablets. Make them out of a wide variety of materials, and coat them in a wide variety of other materials. Then scatter them across a wide variety of environments. You don’t know what sorts of attacks they’re going to face, but doing this maximizes the likelihood that at least a few of them will survive.
At that price you probably can’t even afford steel or plastic. I figur you can spend a hundred dollars a cubic foot. If concrete and gears and stuff can be documented in just a thousand monolith pages, and you scatter a hundred copies over the globe, I think you have five hundred million cubic feet of stuff and only fifty billion to pay for it with.
Maybe each person can memorize and become one monolith…
And forget marble. It’s slightly water-soluble (being nothing more that calcium carbonate or other carbonates), and quite acid-soluble. Marble sculptures get seriously washed away by acid rain. (Photo.)
Seems like a thick enough slab of tempered glass would be pretty damn near eternal.
I’d probably figure out a way to engrave the message inside the glass, and chisel something on the outside in big enough letters to survive millenia of sandstorms.
Well, not to small. One cannot assume that the post-apocalyptic barbarian hordes of the future will have preserved microscope technology despite having to get back all the rest from this encyclopedia.
Otherwise, though, I agree. The best way to ensure this survives is to make lots and lots of copies in various reasonably materials and put them in lots of different places, rather than pinning your hopes on one absolutely indestructible copy, which is not really possible.
The texts that actually survived from the ancient world until modern times were mostly those that were frequently copied, even if only onto fragile materials like parchment and paper, rather than those that were carved, once, into stone.
The hardest part, though, is ensuring it will still be readable by anybody, even if it does survive. After all, there are, right now, lots of written materials that do survive from the ancient world - some of them on quite delicate materials such a papyrus - but lots of them we can’t understand because the language and/or writing system they were written in has been forgotten.
What good is all this knowledge of how to make concrete and gears and stuff if civilization has gotten to the point where we don’t know how to make concrete and gears and stuff?
Oh, one other form of “erosion” you need to consider is humans deliberately cannibalizing the stuff to make tools, weapons, or structures out of it. This is sort of a catch-22: The more durable you make it against natural forms of erosion, the more desirable it’ll be for other uses, and so the more likely it will be repurposed.
Fused silica. A billion bucks should buy you plenty, since you don’t have to care about purity. Also, unattractive to mineral scavengers. For durability, check out all those flint tools in any museum. Most of them look as if they were made yesterday!
Well, once you know something is possible, and especially if you have a general idea of how to achieve or make it, even if not all the specifics, it becomes very much easier to reinvent it. The hardest part of inventing is knowing what to invent, and what will be worthwhile to invent.
inscribe it onto human bone and then let it become fossilized in places all over the world
alternatively, a big block of something like tungsten covered in uranium or plutonium ought to keep most people away as well as allowing them access to it after a set amount of time
