Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 )
"We'd better keep digging--there might be more valuable stuff down here!"
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."
Here's an image of their current prototype sapphire disk.
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.
Just make the Millenarians take care of them.
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.
Yup. Within 500 years the waste is less radioactive than the ore from which it was mined. Marking every waste site makes no more sense than marking every vein of naturally occurring uranium ore.
What makes this especially idiotic, is that in no other area of human activity do we consider the consequences of people this far into the future. We would be way better off spending the money on contraceptives, so we don't use up all the Earth's resources, leaving something for future generations. But instead we are building sapphire disks because there is a 0.0000001% chance that some hard rock miners might be tunneling into Yucca Mountain (which contains no use ore that we know of), 10,000 years from now, and there is a 0.0001% chance that one of these miners might get cancer as a result. That is just absurd.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.