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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
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.
My thought is that within the next few hundred years we'll be recovering resources from landfills and all sorts of spaces too toxic to deal with now.
Already we're dealing with polluted industrial sites. We'll become more and more efficient with that. We'll start to become very efficient at remining rare earths out of landfills and it will cascade from there.
Pirate treasure! Let's dig it up!
Yeah, that'll work.
"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
They said readable in a million years, not edible in a million years. Do you really want some redneck to stumble upon the warning twinkie stash a few thousand years from now and swallow all the information? I thought not. ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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."
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.
Here's an image of their current prototype sapphire disk.
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.