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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.'"
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.
"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.
I'm not a nuclear physicist, and I could be wrong, but isn't the rule of thumb something along the lines of the shorter a half-life an isotope has, the more dangerous it is? Something that decays to another element in a few seconds (or less) is emitting radiation like crazy whereas something that has a half-life of several million years seems practically stable by comparison.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Close. Most things that undergo radioactive decay become other radioactive elements and different particles of various energies. You have to look at the whole decay chain to find out where the bad ones are.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
011100110110001101 110010011001010 1110111001000000100 0011001000000111000001110 101011101000010000001101 00101110100001000000 110000101101100011011000010000001 10100101101110001000000110 00100110100101101110011000010111001001111001
"screw C put it all in binary"
I wonder who else bothered to convert this up before me.
There's dumping and dumping. If you put it in a drilled hole in a subduction zone, it won't ever come out. Or in the lava of volcanos in millions of years. But of course it's not politically correct because this solution involves putting it either in international waters or in front of countries who are not responsible for the radioactive waste.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Holy crap, mods! Am I the only one who RTFA? It's not a CD or computer memory, it's a double layer sapphire disk with silver printing sandwitched in between and needs nothing more complex too read than a simple microscope and knowledge of whatever human language it's written in. The comments about computer languages are JOKES, son (as Mr. Leghorn might say).
It's something to keep future generations whose civilizations have collapsed safe from the poisons we've buried.
Free Martian Whores!