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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.
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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.
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?
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.
I was going to say FORTRAN but COBOL should work.
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.
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.
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)
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 )
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.
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.
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!"
Durker durr!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Oi moi. I love Koine, and in the ancient world you're certainly right (although I don't think it's quite as important as you say it is in the West by the time of Charlemagne), but Latin would still be a better tool for the job today. Latin's influence (including through Vulgar Latin) and language communities far exceed those of Greek; English has far more Latin than Greek (some estimates say as much as 70% of Classical Latin roots could be found in English somewhere once), and 2168 million people speak English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, and hence would be well-equipped to interpret words from a Latin root; Greek today cannot claim more than a fifth of that in influence (even generously counting Russian as heavily Greek-influenced), and, anyway, the meanings of the words have changed much more dramatically.
But, who knows. Maybe deleterion would carry better in a few hundred thousand years than virus. We'll find out, I guess?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I thought the old Skull and crossbones was pretty universal?
Here's an image of their current prototype sapphire disk.
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!
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.
I'm guessing you didn't read the article.
The etching can be read with a microscope. Words and pictographs etched onto the surface....not a computer hard disk.
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.
Just toss some glass or obsidian deaths-head skulls into the concrete and the chambers and they'll work it out quickly enough.
I wonder what an (evolved and intelligent) octopus will understand from a skull presence?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Just make the Millenarians take care of them.
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.
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.
You want it concentrated. That way you can get to it once the Chinese have build breeder reactors and need the old "waste" to fuel their reactors.
This disk should just be a back up plan.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Actually, it was more supposed to be a compromise than a "classics shall prevail forever." My perspective is more that as long as Romance languages survive, Latin will be decipherable, not that future generations will necessarily come pre-equipped with perfect knowledge. In present-day terms that gives it almost twice as much surface area as English does. I strongly expect that re-discovering the ability to translate Latin will come more easily than Greek.
Realistically I believe that the Information Age will be seen as a second classical era, only on a much larger scale. It seems almost certain that modern English is destined to be codified and preserved much like a new Koine, but until it's a dead language we can't say for certain we know exactly how it will be read—and if words like "suffer" and "protest" can still undergo dramatic twists in meaning like they have, I'd be adverse to using current speech as a standard. Latin, at least, is codified, whether it's classical, ecclesiastical, or modern scientific in form. We can say for certain what words have inverted in meaning in its descendent languages, and safe-guard against them or avoid them entirely.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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 ?
Well, just build them as normal hard disks.
Deleted Files by mistake but want to get them back? Files Recovery