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A Million-Year Hard Disk
sciencehabit writes "Pity the builders of nuclear waste repositories. They have to preserve records of what they've buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years, perhaps even millions. Trouble is, no current storage medium lasts that long. Today, Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA presented one possible solution to the problem: a sapphire disk inside which information is engraved using platinum. The prototype shown costs €25,000 to make, but Charton says it will survive for a million years. The aim, Charton says, is to provide 'information for future archaeologists.' But, he concedes: 'We have no idea what language to write it in.'"
What language? All of them.
It's awl-write.
I'll get me coat.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Consider stone tablets. I head they are cheap, easy to come by, and last a long time.
After all, don't they keep it pure?
Or, if you believe Futurama, it'll be a dead language in a thousand years...
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.
Do not use french!
Those control crystals from SG1.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
'We have no idea what language to write it in.'
You have no idea that you should choose English? Fuckin' scientists makin' me pissed.
For 24,999 they can use my idea.... mosquito legs lined up in binary with tree sap poured over it. It'll last millions of years, with the small glitch of not hardening for some odd millions of those years. Maybe by then they can extract the DNA of the mosquito's and clone some truly exotic animals.... like Pee Wee Herman.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
"Into Eternity" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/11/into-eternity-film-review), which documents the staggering engineering requirements of creating a nuclear bunker designed to last a million times longer than any man made object ever created.
The scale of the work involved is almost beyond comprehension. And a hard disk is just a fraction of that work.
It will blow your mind.
They should just use C!
I mean, if they can't write C code, they probably won't do much with this info anyway.
The lingua-franca of tomorrow.
Platinum etchings sandwiched between two layers of sapphire. Like microfilm, but with etchings. So now we can write all sorts of shit down, but where do we put it so we know whoever is digging will stop and figure out what it says?
Personally I think the need for millions of years of survivability are stupid. We've been using atomic energy for what, 60 years? I think we might find a way to put the "waste" to use long before we have to worry about such long-term data storage. That, and we'll either be advanced enough to repair radiation-induced damage in the next couple of hundred years, or civilization will have fallen and our life spans will be so short that a little radiological damage won't really matter.
I would suggest Lojban so nobody gets confused what we were trying to say
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Nobody would think of hunting down a sapphire and platinum artefact just because it has intrinsic value, right?
Heck, it's been around for seemingly forever and doesn't seem to be going away. ;)
Porn. Of course at €25000, that's very expensive porn.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They really need to fuck with the future archaeologists by writing everything in Klingon.
There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology?
The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
I can find out precisely when a building was built, sold, and how many times it was repaired, just by visiting the online city hall archives.
Not only that, I can get a map of my city for every century, and then some. Everything that ever happened here since God knows when. Like 1850 or so? I can get a list of all the people that lived in any given place since the 16th century, when the Church started keeping track of baptismal records. Online.
Why would things ever stop being archived and kept track of? Seriously. Are we going to have a nuclear war or something?
The whole archive would probably fit on a USB pen drive. Making 1000 copies every year would be a rounding error on the city's budget.
In a few years, we'll be drilling for nuclear waste to power our flying cars! Just like how the cave men buried dinosaur waste, which we now pump out as petroleum to power our driving cars.
Future folks will be overjoyed to find an old nuclear waste dump buried on their property, because they will get rich by fracking it! Sapphire disks will be like old, dusty grizzled-prospectors' maps, and be highly valued.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How about, Oh, I dunno. A pictorial map? With a human skull marking each site?
They may dig up one, but after that they should be able to figure out what the other sites are.
So when someone steals it to sell it for scrap for the sapphire and platinum, then what do the people 1000 years from now do?
If my TeeVee has taught me anything, it's that no matter how far into the future or past we go--even if we travel to other worlds--everybody speaks 20th Century English.
When we get spaceship technology and sending big stuff into space cost next to nothing, we will just be able to send all that waste on another planet. Or in the sun. Which shouldn't take us more than 500 years to accomplish.
Are we assuming that diggers in the future won't have a Gieger counter?
And if we're assuming that they won't then we can't make any assumptions about communicating with them in any way.
Just put a skull and crossbones on it and call it a day. If the digging civilization doesn't have skulls or bones, then that's their own problem.
Let's see, they haven't even figured out how to do the fucking signs for the ashes deposits of their uninsured nuclear water-cookers, that have to be guarded for a couple of million years but they want to make us believe it's cheaper than wind generators?
FTA: "Most countries with nuclear power stations agree that the solution for dealing with long-lived nuclear waste is to store it deep inside the earth, about 500 meters below the surface." Nothing new but I still find it disturbing that we do this.
Pictures are very universal. Cave drawings of people hunting animals were immediately understood by people who discovered them. Put in blueprints of the site layout, use atomic model images to denote where material was stored, in what, etc.
Math is also very easy to convey graphically, especially binary. You just have to include a big 'key' at the start to define your symbols. Start with "0 1 10 11" (0,1,2,3) followed by "01 + 01 = 10" (1+1=2) to give the symbols for addition and equality, then multiplication ("10 x 10 = 100"), etc. Once you have the basics it will be easy to convey everything from atomic numbers to dates.
A million years? You just the first phrase will be: "I, for one, welcome our future overlords..."
Amusingly that'll also be the first +5 post when Slashdot covers the unearthing of this drive.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If people hand down information and keep copying it to new media, their fancy drive will be worthless. If you spent years perfecting something ridiculously expensive, wouldn't you want to think it would have some sort of use and not just be some sort of toy?
1) Write multiple warnings and translate them all into every language you can manage. This has the side-effect of being a Rosetta Stone.
2) Draw pictures of humans and other living things suffering the effects of radiation poisoning (and other death images, for good measure).
3) Draw the atomic structure of uranium, plutonium, etc. You could also try drawing fusion/fission/etc. Go crazy.
4) Make it really, really, really hard to get in.
5) Anyone who still gets in is either advanced enough that they'll be safe or dumb enough that they don't deserve to survive.
BONUS STEP: Keep maintaining it so the only way it'll ever become a problem is if humanity gets so close to extinction that by the time they would even get close to getting in, language will have changed so much that they might not understand the written warnings. Or the pictures.
Don't worry about the aliens. If they can get here, I think they'll probably be fine.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
There's also the fact that these stashes themselves are treasure troves for some people... someone might want to mine them in the future so X marking the dangerous spot might not be as smart as it sounds.
And they'd argue about whether we were aliens, and if we knew magic. Pretty cool.
Also, as long as the information was written in a sufficient number of languages, with diagrams, our descendants should be able to figure it out. We probably would, if there were a million-year-old written record.
Assuming a physical storage medium, it should be a stack of gold plate tableaus. One should not "presume" a hard drive principal at all.
Besides that, this whole discussion disregards the top line logic that if you lose continuity of civilization to understand whatever resource is in the storage site, they likely also would not understand what a storage site is, what's in it, that it is hazardous at all, etc. Better to make it hard to get to and say screw it. By putting it in Nevada nobody would bother going there unless the polls melt, the poles shift or some other Earth modification make the place a nice place to live. So put up dead animal skulls all over the place, just in case.
One the other hand if we kill some other post human culture or animals, why do we even care? Set a machine to open the doors to the nuke waste 1000 years after we ignore it (dead man's switch). Screw them.
Bzzt, you are incorrect. Greek has been the real language of trade and science for more than two thousand years.
Its popularity for use as a common language for science was during the relatively short and recent period of neoclassicism (1600s-1800s).
If they can't read English in 1,000,000 years then I say "Fuck'em!"
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
You wouldn't want a single medium that will both last a thousand years as well as not at all be read again for a thousand years.
What you want is a medium that will last a minimum of a couple years, then before a couple years pass copy that data to a new medium device, making updates and translations as needed.
If each generation updates the records more than once, keeping things updated with whatever language changes end up happening over time, then the Content will last thousands of years, yet the medium will not be required to survive longer than a few years.
Then we don't have to make assumptions about the language that will be required a thousand years from now. It will become that over time. The only language to start it with are languages of today.
Our current hard drive technology can do this already.
Store multiple copies on multiple drives. Make damn sure the data will get copied and updated before all of them fail. Always copy onto a new hard drive.
It is reasonable to expect future storage devices to only last longer than current ones, not less.
Keep copying over to the newest and best available at that moment. Never neglect it for too long.
we don't need to write down anything, nor store anything. this is yet another dumb problem with a very easy non-technological solution, that needn't any gadgetry.
we have plenty of information from tens of thousands of years ago. you'd think that archeologists would be familiar with them. They're called rocks.
Bury the nuclear wasted wherever you like, and put a big ugly rock on top of it. and not a round one. I promise, it'll stay there for as long as the waste does.
In a million years, assuming everyone forgot, someone will ask why these weird rocks are everywhere. and then they'll dig beneath one, and find out pretty damn fast.
it's a rock, not a hard place.
The language choice, you would think is simple enough...
Assume that there is intelligent life looking at the disk. If you can't make that assumption, it doesn't matter.
Start with a pictoral key like * = one, ** = two - in other words, basic concepts.
Take it onward to describe items, so a language basis can be made that they can translate to.
Figure out how to write something like 'binary storage medium, 8 bits per character'.
Save a dictionary to the first 100MB.
Place instructions on how to read the rest of the disk.
Store the data after that in whatever format you just described.
If they can't think through the puzzle, then they probably won't know what to do with the waste anyways.
Maybe I'm making too many assumptions here about life several thousand years down the road, but they should have some analysis skills to decode a puzzle if it is made to be simple.
I was once thinking, if you cut tiny dots of 0.1mm in size in stone tablets, then it might be just visible with primitive tools and preserve a long while.
A stone tablet of one square meter could store 100 megabit that way!
Useful?
"We'd better keep digging--there might be more valuable stuff down here!"
Better to engrave the instructions on some metal that can't be easily melted down or chiseled. Make sure to have the words in Latin and Ancient Greek (along with whatever languages you want). Make a few copies of this and give it to a bunch of Catholic monasteries.
The last part is how a good portion of our previous knowledge got preserved (and a lot of the stuff the West got from the Arabs was actually first translated by the Eastern Churches based in Syria and Baghdad).
Not many other institutions have lasted as long. There are probably some Buddhist monasteries as well thinking about it—though the Buddhists aren't attached to this world as much, so may not care so much about knowledge about it and physical objects.
Durker durr!
yabba dabba do
We can assume anyone that reads it, even post-apocalypse, is at least roughly as intelligent as we are, even if their society is set back a bit. You need to include primers. The first engravings should be larger (no special / microscopic instruments required, low density), and go through a pictorial primer explaining the numbers, then basic math, then basic language. From there you can advance to "how to build crude instruments to read higher density disks", and then in the higher density disks you can write oodles of detailed information, starting with more advanced primers on our language and culture.
This is the same basic problem as communications with distant aliens. Except if you expect the reader to at least be our historical descendants, you could include an additional cheatsheet: a rosetta stone of some of the primer info in 10-15 different popular languages of today, in hopes that some vestige of one of the languages survives (or has managed to be preserved in historical studies, or perhaps bears enough resemblance to a modern descendant language that it's relatively easy for them to decode it).
Actually, this is quite true. LFTRs as they were originally designed were in fact for nuclear powered aircraft. They were the only possible design that was safe enough for such an application.
Anyone thinking of burying this "waste" is a bleeding buffoon. LFTR consumes nuclear waste to produce usable fuel that is useless for nuclear weapons. It burns nearly 100% of the fuel, and the only leftovers at the end are highly useful for medical applications.
Watch this, then tell me that we need to engineer million year data storage, much less a million year bunker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
They saved US twice and now look where we are!!
http://millenniata.com/
Produces optical media with a rock-like substrate on optical media--you're literally etching in stone.
They claim it will last at least 10,000 years.
If it's made of valuable material, it will get stolen/recycled/whatever way before 1 million years. Look at the pharao graves, not one survived more then 4000 years. They also had warnings on them, like open this cave and you die. Did that stop anyone? You could write something down like: "Open this nuclear waste bunker, and all life on earth will perish" , and someone would still open it to find out whats in there. Never underestimate human curiosity.
Also each pound of higly radioactivy "waste" is easily worth tousands of dollars. One way or another it will be dug up and reused in a matter of a few centuries or so.
If you really want to get rid of the valuable nuclear waste, probably the best method is to pour it into the ocean. Seriously, if you manage to distribute it evenly over all oceans you get slightly elevated background radiation and there's no way to recover it. But try to convince the treehuggers of this solution :)
Do it in binary...
Is it just me, that thinks this isn't the usual "solution looking for a problem"?
This one goes a step further... it's looking for a solution that's looking for a problem...
In a few years, we'll be drilling for nuclear waste to power our flying cars! Just like how the cave men buried dinosaur waste, which we now pump out as petroleum to power our driving cars.
Thag: "What we write so no one dig here?"
Ugg: "Thag crap here. No one go near it."
Thag: "You funny."
Ugg: "What? Like it matter in 1825 sunrises!"
Thag: "OK, How you spell crap?"
Ugg: "Don't know. Just put small 9 after your name."
Thag: (Draws in the dirt with a stick, then notices his friend's feet) "Hey, where you get boots?"
Ugg: "Made them from fake dead animal."
Horseshit. The hazard is significant for a few hundred years at most. People are not going to dig the stuff up and eat it by the ton.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why take risk on something that should be readable in a million years? Write in both ASCII and EBCDIC. But always have the parity bit on.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That'll last forever.
Use a picture of a person bending over puking. Then put the symbol of the uranium atom next to it. With 238 protons and neutrons. Then a map of the area where the junk is stored.
Complete it with a cartoon of a man, a woman, and a child. Then a symbol of uranium with 232 protons and neutrons. And a map of the area with a big X over where the radioactive stuff is.
In a 100000 years from now, somebody will figure it out.
Hell, a single Frenchman mastered ancient Egyptian from the Rosetta Stone 180 years ago. People are smart. They will continue to be smart 100,000 years from now. Hopefully smart enough to know not to make radioactive poisons that last a million years.
Instead of saving documentation of where the nuclear waste is stored for a million years why don't we dig it up and eject it into space in the next 100 years compliments of SpaceX? Target a blackhole. Problem solved.
Storing ANYTHING for 1 million year is sort of stupid. Knowledge is constantly expanding and in 1 million years I doubt much of anything will still be relevant. So long as we continue to publish revised textbooks, journals, articles, etc every 10-20 years a good 100 years ought to be WAY more than enough to store any individual document.
Oh wait you said a million-year hard disk.
Sorry no idea.
In just a tiny fraction of that million years, the waste will be less radioactive than the natural uranium ore deposits we started with. If we refine the FUEL out of the waste stream first, the records only need to last 250-500 years.
Instead of using any existing language (written or spoken), you use mathematics and pictograms. Essentially the same as how they did the drawing on Voyager.
Just start with a basic number system, individual atoms, then a description of radiation, time periods, etc. None of those should change within a few million years.
If you want to give a start and end date, just use a star chart based on the current location of earth with of a few obvious bodies for reference and project it forward.
Just bury it in a subduction zone and let the earth's mantle incinerate it
They should just use crystal skulls. I hear if you get all 8 of them together they form a RAID array.
It's already possible, and far more cheaply. Also doesn't require a CD drive. Human readable. . .
So they have the technology to decode the sapphire discs but don't have the technology for a Geiger counter?
I see how this plays out:
They dig up these containment vessels that seem to have been buried very carefully in a remote area behind many protections. These must be the burial chambers of the kings! Let's open them and find the loot! Then a few years later the archaeologists die of a horrid disease. It must be the curse of the mummy!
Many bad horror films are then made.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
So put up a picture of the periodic table. Use an "obvious" numbering system - on another page/stone/whatever put several number systems side by side so as to help them figure out the one used on the periodic table. Have a diagram nearby of an atom. Then some diagrams of the buried stuff along with indications which atoms they are composed of. Put a couple materials on the outside that match the diagram, so they can verify the diagrams match the items they've unearthed. Then add some sort of images that depict the nasty elements as hazardous (this seems the most difficult part) so if they don't understand atoms and radiation they can at least get the idea that dangerous stuff be buried there.
Hard drives my ass, we already have trouble reading stuff from 30 years ago. Pictures is the way to go. Sure, we have trouble deciphering stuff from 3000 years ago, but that's a lot of text. Numbers representing different materials shouldn't be too hard, I suspect the periodic table will be recognizable for some time. And there is only one important message - don't open this stuff.
Oh, DISK ... I guess I should stop; I must be going blind.
I thought the old Skull and crossbones was pretty universal?
Here's an image of their current prototype sapphire disk.
What are they going to connect it to? Anyone have an ESDI capable machine around? Communicating with "deep time" is actually quite challenging. It's great that the limiting factor of the platters has (seemingly) been solved. But are we sure the meaning of the message will be faithfully transmitted? This not only includes the technical piece (which is more than just storage, but also retrieval and display), but also culture and language.
Assume that the nuclear repository is 'hardened' in some way - buried in granite, or concrete.
I'll assume there are 3 types of society that could exist in the future - stone/iron age primitives, early industrial era, and advanced societies.
Primitives won't be digging into granite or concrete, so they won't be harmed.
Advanced societies will work out for themselves that it's radioactive, and will map and tag all the dump sites.
So the only problem is for early industrial societies - advanced enough to mine into the granite or concrete, inquisitive about what is there, but not advanced enough to know about radioactivity.
Just toss some glass or obsidian deaths-head skulls into the concrete and the chambers and they'll work it out quickly enough.
platinum and sapphire? Then, in a few more years of the two face one body political system we have here causing the fall of civilization after bankrupting us by bombing brown people and tax cuts for billionaires, it'll be a nice target of concentrated wealth. Looters rejoice!
provide hints in the recording.. fundamental truths, this ought to help anyone decypher it.
Well if they have stuff already that lasts one million years (i.e. the waste) why don't they just use the said waste itself to convey the message? Like write a message using the waste or something like that. Therefore the message lasts as long as it needs to be there...
Needs to do a commemorative "You can't touch this" nuclear edition on sapphire.
Their they're doing there hair.
Teach them the language. Expose 1 gram of the substance, and make one dot. Then label the really hazardous stuff with 100 dots.
If they can't draw a conclusion from that, maybe they deserve to be irradiated.
--
$tar -xvf
Interpretation will be up to whatever prophet digs them up.
Sapphire is Al2O3, aluminum oxide (aka alumina). Alumina dissolves in alkaline pH conditions see, for example, http://www.seachem.com/support/AluminumSolubilityToxicity.pdf). It seems likely that over hundreds of milennia, these discs would be exposed to alkaline conditions as a result of varying geochemistry/hydrology.
Furthermore, sapphire is brittle. Very hard, but brittle. One could break a sapphire disc by dropping it a few feet onto concrete. Over hundreds of milennia, stuff falls, squashes, cracks, etc.
I'm all for covering contingencies, but if a thousand years pass without the human race developing space flight capability that's safe and reliable enough for us to just pitch the waste into the Sun (or for us just to find a way to re-use the waste), we're a hopeless species anyway.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
In a million years who really cares if an archaeologist accidentally digs into a nuclear waste dump. It will only occur once. Once he or she dies from radiation poisoning everyone else will know to stay away.
Also, the assumption here is that in a million years humans, aliens, whomever, won't have the technology to detect those dumps. Heck in a million years they could probably be detected and neutralized from orbit.
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
http://pastebin.com/irj4Fyd5
Sections Overview:
1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum
2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
I think I remember a British sci-fi comedy series (Red dwarf/HHGG?) where the classic stick-figure warning man was clutching his throat while his body was exploding.
First of all, why do you need to preserve SO much information? Simply put: "This place is poison. Invisible poison will kill you, slowly. You will not feel it, but your hair will fall out, your teeth will bleed, food will not nourish you, and you will sicken and die. Your babies will be deformed, if you have any at all. For your own safety, leave now and do not return. There is nothing of value here." Repeat it in every language currently known. Make it readable by the unaided eye.
Second, make it truly inaccessible. You're really just digging a hole? Sink it into an undersea tectonic subduction zone. By the time any of the material resurfaces, many millions of years later, it will have decayed into stable isotopes.
Third, redundancy. You're trying too hard. Platinum and sapphire? Why not solid gold? As others have said, the material is too valuable. Just make plates out of basalt, or basalt fiber, and strew them by the thousands everywhere.
I can see the fnords!
Nice. OK, and what is on the drive? Some video. And that video is in... QUICKTIME! Got drivers for that? Will your video card (do you even have a video card?) handle this data? etc. etc. etc.
OK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFmEqeofSWw
And somehow they have to make sense out of it.
So, then they find another video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSd5XTG7HTI
And now they have to make sense out of that.
Survey says? No freakin way. What will happen? It's made out of SAPPHIRE and PLATINUM! Holy fuck - STRIP IT. Who cares about DATA. The metal is more valuable....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The Human Interference Task Force (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force) was an interdisciplinary group of experts convened to address the subject for the EPA in connection with the Yucca Mountain site in the early 1980s. You can download EPA_Passive_Institutional_Controls.pdf (love that title!) from http://lobby.la.psu.edu/066_Nuclear_Repository/Agency_Activities/EPA/ for a good read. In a concluding assessment of the project (not sure if it's in the above PDF), the experts were asked to express the likelihood of success of any markings as a percentage. If I recall, the only one who gave it over a 20% chance was the graphic designer - he put it at 50%.
Just make the Millenarians take care of them.
In the future phones will have radiation detectors on them. Any diggers will be warned well in advance
They should show it in pictures. And make a projector cum disk reader hardware which lasts a million years (goes for batteries as well).
Maybe we could hire scientologists to guard the stuff instead. Don't they sign billion-year work contracts?
Cuneiform on stone can be machine readable and writeable and will last a very long time.
Now I am not talking about The Flintstones type of stuff. I'm talking about something quite a bit more refined but must also be readable by the human eye.
Roman character are also faily clear for printing and reading as well I suppose...
they back it up in the cloud everything should be a-okay ;-)
uranium comes from ore dug out of the ground, at something like 0.1%-1.0% uranium oxide concentrations, so why not just take the radioactive waste and mix it with filler to dilute it down to ore concentrations (suspended in concrete, glass, whatever, something cheap and relatively durable) and drill some really deep holes, deep enough it won't affect any ground water tables, and away from oil fields - ideally near a subduction zone trench where over time the waste would get carried down further into the crust as the waste impregnated plate dives downward. Far out of reach from civilization and in concentrations no more dangerous than already exist in nature. Surely that has to be more cost effective in the long run than maintaining highly guarded secret storage bunkers indefinitely....
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
Thanks a ton for that link. I didn't know that and now that I do I consider it a big hole in my knowledge.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why not place a world map with nuclear waste storage sites on it? Sure, continents drift, but people in million years should know about past shape of the world the same we do.
In 10000 years, the current living languages will have evolved beyond recognition. Our current media don't have the lifetime of stone engravings, so in 10000 years, "new civilizations" will be more likely to have their archeologists dig up Latin artifacts and documents than modern English ones.
> I can find out precisely when a building was built, sold, and how many times it was repaired, just by visiting the online city hall archives.
False. In Venezia, North Italy, Europe, one of the most important historic buildings is the luxurious Hotel Royal Danieli. It's a pale red blob that stands right next to the Doge's Palace, facing the St. Marks's basin. It used to be a Palazzo Dandolo, except nobody knows any more which branch of the extended Dandolo noble family built it and when was it erected... Certainly before 1400, probaby circa 1380-1390, but there are no records preserved about that.
This is rather amazing, since Venezia was never demolished for re-zoning or razed in warfare (that's how they manage to have a tourist trap city that is composed of 90% or more of 350+ year old buldings). The merchant city-state's famously meticulous records are still kept and intact, literally hundreds of tons of moldy papers accumulated since medieval times, yet there are holes in the story.
As far as Lt. Murphy goes with his famous law, it is a sure bet that the french nuclear waste storage facility will be another Hotel Danieli, unless truly extraordinary measures are taken to preserve landscape and architectural information. The difference is, not knowing when Danieli was built and thus, not knowing about the average Adriatic sea level at the time may make your feet wet when the aqua alta tide arrives. In contrast, in a rad-waste facility, if the water comes up from underground and brings up isotopes, your legs will rot off due to rad poisoning...
Sapphire and platinum, I bet it would be a unique, beautiful and cool object... so unique and beautiful that its going to get stolen.... and if its known that nuclear sites have them it will just encourage people to dig there looking for the disk.
Por supuesto!
Barring a total collapse of the world, we're unlikely to be losing a lot of important data being created now. If there is a total collapse, we've got bigger fish to fry than some old time capsule.
That said, a single hard drive should be able to hold dictionaries and language tools for every language going, as well as whatever message they want to put on it.
Label the main radionucleides clearly, then have a simple drawing of the site marked with the symbols.
Our own pre-chemical societies often had problems just from natural hazards. There is a Roman lead mine up on the Mendips near where I live where the water is, to say the least, not potable. In the Harz mountains people suffered from the effects of nickel salts in the water, which they attributed to the work of the devil (which is why nickel is called nickel...). If civilisation collapses or if we die out and are replaced, many more creatures will die of natural hazards than will be killed by our repositories.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One rather drastic option would be to put lots of warning notices at the entrance followed by a radioactive source that will initially kill anybody in a few hours. The learning curve should be fairly short.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Something like that's valuable even when it's new. Odds of it ending up locked in some private collector's vault, or being stolen and never seen again, once it's a couple of thousand years old? 100%.
Or... you could use paper, paper is good. Also; its a tested technology that we know can survive thousands of years if done right.
BTW. My captcha was bitumen! LOL!
I propose bones. Huge piles of bones will get our ancestors to think about what could be wrong with this place and that it is not save to enter with out a bit of caution. The storage of the bones could be a problem but if you are clever you can create a wildlife trap with integrated fossilization and all run by and hinting to the radioactive problem it self.
The work has already been done, see the Rosetta Stone project of the Long Now foundation:
http://rosettaproject.org/.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
(...) Perhaps /. shouldn't give more mods to people who spend (or waste) all of their mod points whenever they get them and shouldn't keep giving mods to people who have a history of voting negatively.
I fear this to be a sign of less users on /.
For a couple of months now, I find myself endowed with mod points in an unusually frequent way. ;-)
Up to last year I got to mod only now and then; I didn't improve my participation, or so I feel
I'm worried if modpoints are attributed more often this may mean that le are just less numerous...
H.
Herve S.
The language to write it in should be COBOL. It seems that sucker will never die.
"If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read."
and send it to the sun
Print the data on sheets of gold. It can be thin. It wont degrade and you wont need a player that lives for 40,000 years.
Digital is not the answer to everything.
Natural saphires are expensive gem stones.
When the civilization collapses such a disk will easy end as lots of gems in a necklace of a queen.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A civilization that can read a digital storage medium is likely to have geo-exploration techniques that can locate the dangerous stuff directly.
A civilization that *can't* is just going to take the platinum-and-sapphire thing to whoever in their society gets to keep all the pretty stuff. I mean, epic schwag or what?
Any readable "this is real dangerous" warning will, guaranteed, be taken by some to mean that something of great value is hidden inside. Bold adventurers (suicidal castaways, drunken wanderers) will venture in, find nothing validating the warnings, but come back to their communities contaminated, with tales of unspoilt resources of great value (even if that's only a dry space with a good roof).
So just make it obviously as dangerous as it really is. Surround the entrances, and distribute randomly within the area, caches of material so active it will cause quick death to anyone who comes near it. *That's* a universal warning, no?
"Hey, I think these distinctive structures, ancient pictographs and/or artificial barriers mean that it's dangerous to go any further". "Where, over here? .... oooh, not feelin' good all of a sudden ... ".
All these schemes for warnings seem to be just a salve for the consciousnesses of people who want to pretend that burying million-year-lifetime radioactive waste can be made acceptable to our current sensibilities of low (and declining) risk tolerance.
Either that, or it's a subversive plot by opponents who want to show that long-term storage is an insurmountable ethical problem for both power generation and weapons development.
Wasn't the CD supposed to last for 100 years? Yet we see CD Rott all the time.
The Divine Language from The Fifth Element. At least the Mondoshawan will be able to read it some day.
**** BIG Ba-Da-Boom ****
Seriously, any civilization that can read that sapphire probably already knows what's down there by the massive ticking of their radiation detectors. Just carve pictures into the stone in case we blow ourselves back to the stone age in the meantime.
The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
The Library of Alexandria begs to differ:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
"the largest and most significant[1] great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship [...]
Julius Caesar accidentally burned the library down when he set fire to his own ships to frustrate Achillas' attempt to limit his ability to communicate by sea."
WHOOPS!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Yes. Write down the same text in, say, the top 10 major modern languages and writing systems (let's say, English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, French, Russian, Japanese etc).
Add Latin and Ancient Greek to that list.
The Christian Churches have been around for 2000 years, and all the various texts that they have are/were written in those two languages, and they've survived the Dark Ages, a few plagues, and a few collapses of empires. Odds are that after the next cataclysm, there will be a few monasteries around picking up the pieces of civilization that will be able to handle the text.
Look at today. How many different electronic book formats are there? Ten years from now, how many e-book readers will read these same formats, and how many new ones will there be? A hundred years from now, you'll have even more formats growing at that same progression rate until either a radical shift in information storage occurs, or the system becomes overloaded. Today, many people devote time and energy to maintaining these formats or helping convert them from older to newer, but the center cannot hold; eventually, information will be lost.
Roger MacBride Allen has an interesting time travel series called The Chronicles of Solace that briefly touches on a similar issue to this; archiving historians struggle to contain the ever-growing wealth of data that humanity generates. Specifically, they attempted to copy and duplicate all written and electronic material in a readable format for use in the Grand Library, but constantly struggle with the task that the 'standard' access method changes rapidly every few years. Not only do they have to create a format for storage that can survive ever-growing changes, but it must also contain built-in equipment that can be reverse-engineered and re-used after a potential interplanetary disaster removes all human knowledge of the technology. Their current solution? Printed books. Billions of them.
That explains the cave paintings where the hunters went to the very back of the cave, made some red ink from red berries, drunk it from a bowl, placed their hand against the cave well and blew all the red ink back onto the wall and their hand, leaving only a silhouette of their hand. I guess it was their way of saying "don't eat the red berries here, they taste like crap!".
And that message has lasted 18000 years through time, until some cub scouts scrubbed the cave wall clean as part of their "anti-grafitti" campaign.
See the Rosetta Stone for more information.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
25,000 euros? What a waste. Just throw a couple Mr. Yuck stickers on the front door and call it a day.....
"Just as there is nothing so unreal as reality TV, there is nothing as unsocial as social media." - Alistair Dabbs
One must be prepared to teach A language from base concepts.
Start with base mathematics--primes, natural numbers, real numbers, etc.
Then basic physical laws.
Work up to periodic table of elements.
From there, one should be able to 'splain that the substance is dangerous and should be avoided.
How will they know its bad stuff down in the hole??
When they die...
Really, all of this effort for a low risk issue for just a couple of tomb robbers at some far off time?
I mean, we should do what we can, but they seem to be getting stuck on making it 100% fool proof, when I'm sure 99% is much cheaper and will work just as well.
Anyway, either they have technology.. something they will probably need to even get near the stuff, and hence will understand what it is.. Or they don't. In that case they will assume it is just curses and other such garbage, and also assume that something worth looking at is down there and they will dig anyway..
Then die.
Plant a weed garden around the blocked entrance. Humans, visiting the site much later, will be warned off by the cunning, intelligent, carnivorous mutant weeds.
Some illiterate would just steal the the pretty disk, unable to resolve the tiny markings.
--
So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
If your argument will sweep aside a language's longevity, then I would point out that the technical world has for more English than Latin. It seems far more appropriate to discuss modern ideas with English than with Latin as retrofitting an ancient language seems like extra work. Also, the only modern language even remotely close to classical latin in terms of syntax and vocabulary would be Romanian. But I am in no way suggesting using that as the lingua franca.
Esperanto is a neo-latin (heh, not to be confused with neu latine), but using that as a basis of a long term document would be laughable.
I would argue that if future generations can translate Latin, then they can also translate Greek. Not because of similarities to find with English, French, and other languages. But because if they have access to Latin, then it follows that they have access to other classical languages. If they had access to English, then obviously they would not need a Latin translation at all!
My suggestion for Greek is not a serious one. It was suggested only to point out the folly of establishing long term documents on Latin. As both Greek and Latin make certain assumptions on a future reader's knowledge of classical languages, while at the same time assuming that future readers have less access to modern languages. To put it succinctly, I don't accept your implied premise.
Of course we need too. Building these super bunkers and the technology to do it requires tons of funding from the government, which means tons of pointless jobs for everyone!
Does it come with its own bottle of Crystal?
Stop burying the crap. I'm pretty sure any future human civilization (and most animals), will happily avoid a barren radioactive desert shitpile for as long as it remains so.
paint a map on a cave wall where x marks the spot. Long lasting and only $1.25 for supplies.
so like the fact that it needs to be documented for that long doesn't raise questions anymore as to just how 'clean' this source of energy is?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
do it in greek, hieroglyphics and hieratic script.
Well, just build them as normal hard disks.
Deleted Files by mistake but want to get them back? Files Recovery