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A Home-Made Power Supply that Lasts 1000 Years?

Posted by Cliff on from the zero-point-energy dept.

x_man asks: "This may sound a little strange but I've accumulated a lot of cool stuff throughout my life. Add to that my parent's stuff, my wife's stuff, and all of the other cool stuff I plan to accumulate before I die, and you have a lot of stuff. The problem is what to do with all of this stuff when I die. My descendants will want a few bits, but I can't bear the thought of my 1000+ collection of sci-fi books being scattered to the Goodwill winds. Therefore, I've decided to entomb my stuff. It will all go into an airtight stainless steel shipping container and be buried on a family plot for a 1000 years or so. I will have the ultimate geek time capsule, but there is one problem. Let's say you want to broadcast some sort of locator beacon in a 1000 years. How do you construct a reliable power supply that will last at least 1000 years or more? There's also the question of how to signal future generations. I'm thinking some sort of VLF for ground penetration."

1 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Why by mugnyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What are you putting in the capsule that you think should really be interesting in 1000 years? PS2 games with a TV and such? Spare them, please.

    Think about the degradation of plastics, oxidation of the materials, and outside interference from shock, moisture on the container, and other items. Why try to make junk from today work forever?

    It may be more interesting to put something personalized and written from you describing your life, rather than trying to bottle it. Your apparatus of the container is a good judgement of the technology available at the time. Also, you get to solve the "how should i communicate and store it" question (been done on /. many times)

    Then, the geek portion of you can still solve the issues of
    - how to safely hold the contents
    - when to wake up (never?)
    - how to wake up
    - how to detect premature tampering
    - how to perform a self-diagnostic to let finders know if they're seeing your intended payload
    - how to signal once awake

    All these have great metaphors in CompSci/Networking references. I'd start there.

    The battery is a chemistry problem, driven by how much power you'll need. If you act like a RF beacon and signal 1kW once every 24 hours, you can decide how much power you'll need. A pulsed beacon will definitely singal longer than most. RF will be more detectable than other sources (especially if underground), and best if you sweep a wide freq. on each pulse.

    Also, work out the location: Are you buying land in a relatively quiet place on the earth? Not on a geologic fault, floodplain, mild temperature ranges, development area, etc. You could probably only extrapolate about 300years into the future with any chance of a lucky guess, IMHO.

    And really, you could just toss it into a FreshKills, NY (a trash dump). Your signal will lead our descendants to a treasure trove of items.