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This already exists: Rosetta Disk.
CAPTCHA: artifact

You underestimate archaeologists.

Hang on, there seems to be something embedded in the glass. Let's point a microscope at it.

The Long Now foundation has found a nice solution to this. Put some writing around the edge of the glass disc. Make the initial few words large enough to be readable without magnification, and then make the text progressively smaller to encourage people to grab a magnifier.

Why not do something like the Rosetta Projectand etch all the pages on to a mass produced metal disk?

And if you don't limit yourself to the requirement that the text be optically readable, you could make 'Feynman's Library,' use modern semiconductor lithography processes to etch the entire library of congress onto something the size of a library card(and in some sturdy material that ).

For the most part we have the technology to do this, the only big difficulty with doing such a thing(aside from scanning all the books!) would be getting liscensing to 'print' all the books in the library of congress.

http://rosettaproject.org/

Wouldn't something like this (microscopically etched / electroformed solid nickel) be even better? You could include instructions for creating a microscope to read it in large print on the other side...

The Long Now Foundation has devised an interesting mechanism for storing important information which, although not optimal for machine readability, is dense and has an obvious format: a metal disk etched with microprinting, whose exterior shows text getting progressively smaller as an obvious way of saying "look at me under a microscope to see more":

http://rosettaproject.org/

I highly recommend reading The Clock of the Long Now if you're interested in the theory and practice of making things last.

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Source: The Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Source: The Rosetta Project

Check out the Rosetta Project - http://rosettaproject.org/about/

The Rosetta Disk http://rosettaproject.org/ is actually designed to give future humans some hint that the object contains microscopic data. Yes people have actually thought about these issues.

I propose writing on titanium or aluminum sheets. Most of the writing would be in tiny microscopic font to get some decent data density -- like microfilm of the 80's, but with better long-term durability.

On the first page we could put normal-size writing as sort of a primer. Then the text would get progressively smaller until it's microfilm-sized, so the reader would get the point that the rest of the tablet is in tiny letters. We could put a diagram explaining the properties of a magnifying glass, and how to make one.

A bit like the plans for the Rosetta Project: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale.

The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly - about 100 nanometers - off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across - about the width of 5 human hairs - and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X. The outer ring of text reads "Languages of the World" in eight major world languages.

Link

The work has already been done, see the Rosetta Stone project of the Long Now foundation:
http://rosettaproject.org/.

These waste management folks might want to look at the Rosetta Disk project:
    http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

It's, you know, a disk meant to store information for a very long time.

However, instead of focusing on building a clock, I'd focus on how to pass our current knowledge into the future so it may survive a possible collapse and re-building of civilization. This is of course a much harder problem than building a long-living clock, but also much more worthwhile.

I take it that you haven't bothered reading up on the Long Now Foundation.

Trying to pass on knowledge is in fact one of their earlier projects, where they are trying to create the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, but with modern languages and the ability to translate between all currently known written languages. They are betting that one of these languages is going to survive for another 10k years or more (in some form), but they aren't betting just on English or even a European language. In addition, they are trying to come up with some technologies for preserving knowledge in such a way that the information is preserved yet the media that the information is preserved upon isn't more valuable than the information itself.

Yeah, that is the real trick. It turns out that Gold and Silver are really some of the best metals to preserve information for a very long period of time, but unfortunately that is also valuable for other purposes, at least historically, and records made of the stuff have been smelted down destroying the information in the process, in spite of being sometimes preserved for hundreds or thousands of years.

One of the original versions was a preservation of the text of the Bible, translated into multiple languages. That version is still around for those who care about it, but the current text is much more secular in nature and agnostic toward religion of any kind.

I could get into more detail here, but there are a bunch of people way smarter than I am, who have also spent many years in deep thought about the issue. Concepts to expand upon the topic include somehow preserving copies of Wikipedia or something similar. They've also been able to put some of the discs they've created onto some spacecraft, so this information already is being seeded among various places in the solar system. Copies of these discs are expected to be a part of the clocks as well, sort of a part of the historical archives that are preserved with the clock so somebody dismantling the clock to see how it works will eventually uncover one of the Rosetta discs.

All of that goes into the basics of just linguistics. I'd agree that a basic series of engineering articles that go into depth about how to re-create everything might be just as useful. For example, how to make a lathe, machine screw, and other tools from nothing more than some tree branches and a pile of raw metal ore would be incredibly useful, not to mention going into more depth about how to progress from that to power generation of various kinds (basic steam engines that are efficient) to eventually building your own electronic fab lab from just those basic tools. I would guess such a book series could be quite valuable.

The Long Now Foundation is thinking about and working on projects like The Rosetta Disk, which crams a bunch of languages onto a 4 inch metal disk. "This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation. The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’" That's just part of their "10,000 year library."

Contact the Rosetta foundation, and use his physical format to give your data a lifespan of ten millenia.

Nah, just etch it DEEPLY into big stones. Something so big and heavy, not even an elephant's footfall could destroy it.

I'm still thinking that the Rosetta Project ought to have, somewhere in the larger text sections, instructions for building microscopes.

"They could probably take care of that by etching a description in multiple languages in epoxy. And who knows, in the future, it may turn out to be useful as a sort of Rosetta stone."

That's another Long Now project:

Project Rosetta

http://www.rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

The Rosetta Disk has spiraling text that gets smaller and smaller, telling you implicitly that what you need is a magnifier. It doesn't explain how to build a microscope, though.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the disk format from the Rosetta Project, tho' it may be waaaay overkill for this ;)

Uhh, dude, it's only 25 years. That's not a long time; barely a third of a lifetime. It's probably not nearly worth the cost to etch a metal disk and design a machine to read it in 25 years. Now, if he wanted to read it in 10,000 years, you might be on to something...

Almost, think lithography onto a stable substrate

http://www.rosettaproject.org/about-us/disk/concept

Needs a microscope to read

Hi. Have a look here: http://www.rosettaproject.org/ That's for 10.000 years +! Maybe there's the odd idea that might help you. I think the best way is to think back 25-50 years and see what has survived (i.e. can still be read). Then extrapolate from that. My current take on it. Put it all on a NetBook like EeePC or Acer Aspire One and bury the whole thing (cheap option, expensive option would be a whole notebook). Make sure you take care of the battery. Research what you have to do to make it survive 25 years. This solution incoorporates all the technology needed to reproduce the images in a digital way. I think there will be some way to interface these devices to technology in 25 years. Cheers Oliver

... it might happen to be a rosetta disc
(which should store 30.000 Pages of text for 10.000 years).

If I remember correctly, one flew to Mars already.

You could, of course, update the technology a bit: Rosetta Project. High density, readable with a high quality microscope, and partially readable with the naked eye -- the spiral of shrinking text should make the usage instructions obvious: "get a magnifying glass, there's more here."

Laser engraving, seriously. There's some project out there....
ah yes, here, that seeks to preserve all the languages of the world by laser-engraving them onto stainless steel plates. They've changed things up a bit, but the basic idea is the same: put it somewhere it won't get lost or corrupted, and if it's important, people will figure it out later. If it's not important, then it doesn't matter.

Very few things in the world are really worth keeping for even a lifetime. If your grandkids inherit all of your stuff, what will they save and keep, and what will they throw away? If you know what they will throw away, why not save them the trouble and toss it yourself?

We've gotten ourselves into this mindset where making backups of every piece of data you've ever owned ought to be saved, for no other reason than because it's easy and cheap. I think everyone should have a periodic storage meltdown to force them to reconsider what it is they really need to have.

They completely ignored the fact that the chips and memory managing the system will likely have some degree of failure in the 1400 years the data will survive on their media architecture.

Look, I am into genealogy quite a bit and see this as a tremendous problem.

The only thing approaching a viable solution is the Rosetta Disk ( http://www.rosettaproject.org/ ) using etched nickel media (rock) in a human readable format, which you could theoretically create a binary cipher for a global archival format.

But, that would take a lot of foresight, which unfortunately us people don't have (yet).

However, seeing that as completely inaffordable for us mere mortals, that leaves me with PAPER, yes, paper, as the only trustworthy medium-term solution.

I do hope everyone here realizes that if we had some sort of cosmic EMP-like event traversing the globe, we'd lose 99% of data and be plunged into the dark ages, right? We couldn't even re-create all of the machines that surround us since virtually all designs are kept digitally now. Factories would just shut down and never be able to be brought back up and every history of our existence would be forgotten in a few generations.

Our civilization is sitting on a house of cards.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/

Whoever builds a technology to read/write the encoded information to/from the Rosetta Disk that includes both video and audio: http://www.rosettaproject.org/about-us/disk/concept will be a rich company.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/

Whoever builds a technology to read/write the encoded information to/from the Rosetta Disk that includes both video and audio: http://www.rosettaproject.org/about-us/disk/concept will be a rich company.

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

You do know about the Rosetta Project?
I'd take for granted that if they find a way to cheaply mass-produce these kind of information pellets, someone will follow up with something more oriented towards preserving scientific knowledge, culture and society, what we know about the people that came before us, etc.
I'm not sure about what information density they are going for. They cite 15 000 pages, but I can't find how many characters per page. Still, a wiki page or two shoud fit easily.

(You could object about the level of technology needed to read it. Basically you need to know about lenses, and microscopes, but a small amount of text starts out eye-readable and gets smaller, so you could include instructions for progressively better optical instruments...)

If they can pull it off, it might be a good "Medium term" archive format (in other words, about 100 - 500 years), as there are many many books of those ages.

Given that the BBC's Domesday project (data gathered in 1986) needed to be "rescued" by 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm ), then there are currently no reliable digital archive systems for long term storage.

On the other hand, the Rosetta Project look like they could get it licked for really long term storage (Example http://www.rosettaproject.org/about-us/disk/concep t)

Congratulations on the successful chisel-matrix printhead refit, but stone? Oh man, you're begging for serious erosion and seismic problems only a few millennia down the road. You need to step up to micro-etched nickel for data worth keeping.

What will survive of our world today in 10,000 years time?
Check out the Clock of the Long Now
Also, the Rosetta project
Anyone know of other long term projects, like long term nuclear fuel storage facilities (ie that will survive into future 'barbaric' time periods) or animal/plant genetic preservation libraries?

What about long-term human knowledge preservation projects (i.e. written on 'long-lasting paper'!)? doomsday or not, data CDs are good for a few years at best, and my 10 yr old college text books are ragged (and obsolete).

I found this interesting article on the aptly named Rosetta Project. It's nothing too new, but it shows that there are ways to preserve data. New tech isn't always the answer. Those Babylonians were on to something...

Thirdly, a key is a REALLY good idea - something analogous to the Rosetta Stone.

Not exactly replying to your post as simply having my memory spurred with regard to something relevant: if you're really interested in storing information for future generations then The Rosetta Project is an interesting on. They seek to have as many distinct languages as possible printed on a small disk, beginning in large print but decreasing in size as it spirals inwards to the point where it is micro-etched. It's easy enough to figure out how to read it, and as long as you cna build tools to magnify it you can read everything on it.

Jedidiah.

Many /.-ers would be interested in the Rosetta Project which aims to preserve many world languages using an extremely failsafe medium. defintiely a cool read -- check it out.

sure, it may not be terribly convenient, but it's certainly going to be readable 100 to 1000 years from now (by which point we should have adequate OCR to complete the task of reading the disc automatically)

Check out the micro-etched data disks used by the Rosetta Project. Their goal is to create a long-lasting archive of the basic elements of 1,000 different languages. The storage medium they're using involves etching readable words on to metal disks. The words are not readable by the naked eye, but all you need to read them is a decent optical microscope -- no special hardware or software.

The Rosetta Project's customized "Rosetta Disk" adds another clever innovation: naked-eye-readable words around the edge of the disk get smaller as they spiral inward, making it clear to anyone who might find this disk in the future that there is more information to be read at greater magnifications.

Yeah, check out the nickel disc produced by the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/diskdiagram

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/disk

Yeah, check out the nickel disc produced by the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/diskdiagram

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/disk

Yeah, check out the nickel disc produced by the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/diskdiagram

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/disk

Actually, it turns out some other folks have been thinking about this archive/permanence problem, and one such set of folks has come up with an idea sort of like yours. I'd read of it back in college and your post reminded me of it.

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

Sometimes /. has very cool discussions/threads.

If you are going to compromise for something cheaper and simpler I suggest rebackuping everything every 2-5 years and not destroying the old media and checking the condition of the older storage medias. This way if the new storage media is unreliable, there is high likelyhood that the older ones still work.

The Long Now Foundation has done some thinking about these issues. It appears that part of the solution is to engrave everything onto a 2" metal disk.

It might be pricey, but wouldn't it be worth it for your 400th great grand-children to be able to listen to your New Kids on the Block collection?

Already covered, for thousands of years to come. The new, improved Rosetta Stone. A really nifty project. I want one.

Already covered, for thousands of years to come. The new, improved Rosetta Stone. A really nifty project. I want one.

They did.
http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

Some people have already approached the problem of making some data readable after a very long period of time - The Roseta Project. While their medium isn't digital, it is extremely durable and technology independent. It only takes a conscious observer to be able to (gradually) read it. Great idea.