Billion Year Storage Media

Thorfinn.au writes "Even though the data density of digital information storage has increased tremendously over the last few decades, the data longevity is limited to only a few decades. If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years. In this paper a medium is investigated consisting of tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time."

what about the data format?

[gmack]

That's nice and all but can we trust our data formats to stay static for that long? Having the data but being unable to open it seems rather useless to me.

Data

[prefec2]

Most of our data are totally uninteresting pieces of garbage. Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments. They will think that we died out because we were egocentric egoistic maniacs who do not care about their future and legacy. Furthermore, they will see it as direct evidence that we preserved nonsense about our pity lives in a super material, while other knowledge was not stored at all. But maybe, they just come up with the idea that the data must be somewhat scrambled, as it makes no sense at all.

Re:Data

[SigmundFloyd]

Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments. They will think that we died out because we were egocentric egoistic maniacs who do not care about their future and legacy.

And they will likely be right.

Whole idea is humorous

[Oligonicella]

The entire concept of storing data for a billion years is nothing but ego. It would be akin to our finding a cave with forty-five thousand little paintings of dots, squares and circles - all perfectly preserved. What the hell does it mean? Curious and interesting to speculate on perhaps, but data? Not so much.

Re:Data

[Teancum]

Considering that archaeologists spend most of their time literally digging through garbage dumps, it is a funny choice of words to even say that "uninteresting garbage" is something that people in the future won't care about.

Even if you take something like the Bible, which has been filtered through the hands of hundreds of generations of religious folks trying to make a philosophical point and to promote a certain viewpoint of history, there are still stories of incest, drug abuse, love poems, marital court rulings, genealogical records, dry legal codes, military order of battle charts, minutes of committee meetings, and of course battle reports and some epic tales thrown into the middle of all of that other stuff. I'm just suggesting that in the course of 10k-20k of written history those things which still survive tends to include a whole bunch of that "uninteresting garbage" even when it is heavily edited.

What you are saying here is so true.

Analog vs. Digital?

[ZahrGnosis]

We've been historically terrible at deciphering ancient languages without something to help link it to a current language (such as the Rosetta Stone).

All this talk of data formats spanks of a very digital future, which I think we have a very hard time of predicting. The linked article is very binary... the grooves they explain can have "two or more" readable states, and their use of a QR code is interesting since it's an analog representation of an absurdly hard to decipher technology (without a key, as parent indicates should be the first thing). How would we encode data on these things? ASCII encoded English? Aliens would have to decode a language and then translate it. There's got to be something easier.

At least the QR code is ultimately a 2D picture, though. I'd imagine any thorough storage over that period of time will have to start with something extremely basic. Sculptures or 2D visual instructions that clearly lay things out. I think you could probably describe a mathematical encoding mechanism visually, but a language would take some work. The Arecibo message [wikipedia.org] is somewhat famous for being a digital message that is notoriously difficult to interpret, and that's by people who would actually recognize some of the glyphs. The picture attached to the 1970s Pioneer vessels is higher resolution and easier to identify, and the audio/visual nature of the Voyager Golden Record is also interesting. But still the idea that these will be intelligently deciphered by themselves is tiny.

It's impressive that they're building something to last... they're just going to have to spend a lot of time figuring out what to put on it. Should lead to some interesting conversations.