A Million-Year Hard Disk

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Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 12, 2012 @11:27AM from the sapphires-are-forever dept.

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.'"

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easy answer. by the+biologist · 2012-07-12 11:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

What language? All of them.
1. Re:easy answer. by hawguy · 2012-07-12 11:57 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  What language? All of them.
  They should write it in C -- it'll never go away since it'll always be needed for embedded systems.
2. Re:easy answer. by sapphire+wyvern · 2012-07-12 12:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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).
  Maybe include a concise dictionary of each language as well.
  That way, even if the thing doesn't end up being useful for its designated purpose as a nuclear site marker, it may one day in the far future serve as a Rosetta Stone for the languages and writing systems of our era.
3. Re:easy answer. by philip.paradis · 2012-07-12 13:27 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I think that means civilization will collapse immediate after it's written.
  
  --
  Write failed: Broken pipe
4. Re:easy answer. by ganjadude · 2012-07-12 13:49 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  011100110110001101 110010011001010 1110111001000000100 0011001000000111000001110 101011101000010000001101 00101110100001000000 110000101101100011011000010000001 10100101101110001000000110 00100110100101101110011000010111001001111001
  
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  have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
5. Re:easy answer. by Artea · 2012-07-12 13:58 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
Cuneiform by ackthpt · 2012-07-12 11:31 · Score: 5, Funny

It's awl-write.
I'll get me coat.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If ancient people taught us anything... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-12 11:31 · Score: 5, Funny

Consider stone tablets. I head they are cheap, easy to come by, and last a long time.
1. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-07-12 11:47 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I head they are cheap, easy to come by, and some of them last a long time.
  FTFY.
2. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by TheRealMindChild · 2012-07-12 11:58 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen .... *tablet shatters* .... Ten! Ten Commandments! For all to obey!
  
  --
  
  "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
3. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by hawguy · 2012-07-12 12:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Consider stone tablets. I head they are cheap, easy to come by, and last a long time.
  They are only cheap if you need a few of them. Each sapphire disk holds 40,000 pages, and the prototype with 2 disks costs "only" €25,000.
  Can you make and engrave a stone tablet for less than €0.30?
4. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by similar_name · 2012-07-12 12:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  At this moment your post is modded down '-1 overrated' to give your post a score of zero. IMO /. has had an increasing number of unjustified negative mods. Your post is on-topic and reasonable. You don't have a 6 digit ID (neither do I) but you're a million away from all of the 2.6 million ID trolls and shills and your comment history doesn't indicate you're a nuisance that needs to be modded down all of the time (the last zero score post I see by you is equally baffling). Hopefully someone will come along and at least mod you back to your natural score.
  
  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.
  
  Sorry for the off-topic* post but it's really been bothering me lately and I needed to vent.
  
  *If someone is going to mod my post down please at least use the correct mod of off-topic.
5. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by gr8_phk · 2012-07-12 13:38 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I can encode a "don't open" image on one table, the periodic table on another, several number systems (for translation) on a third, and a schematic of the objects buried on a 4th indicating the radioactive elements inside other materials. So yes, 4 tablets that don't require technology to decode. Or one could do a large tablet including all of the above. The first image is all you need. The other 3 are for civilizations that understand atoms to understand what the hazard is.
6. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by subreality · 2012-07-12 13:48 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Sometimes I do make flippant remark or make an attempt a humor that (rightfully) gets modded down
  My pet peeve: sometimes I make some vaguely amusing remark in the middle of an otherwise well thought out post. Someone moderates it "Funny", but it really wasn't, nor was it meant to be. Then future mods look at it as a trainwrecked attempt at humor rather than being mis-moderated, and it gets pounded to the ground with "overrated". It's really frustrating to have that happen when I put a lot of effort into a long, well-researched comment.
  I'm not sure what could be done about it, though. Perhaps hide the "Funny" flag from moderators to prevent the bias?
7. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by Trogre · 2012-07-12 14:06 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  And still they are often ignored. See Japanese tsunami warning stones.
  
  --
  "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
8. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by Leuf · 2012-07-12 14:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The article talks about how the pyramids got looted within a generation. So by all means, make your don't dig here notice out of fucking platinum and sapphire. I'm sure no one will want to go looking for those things to steal them. A stone tablet sounds pretty much like the ideal medium, but even that will probably get looted because people are stupid.
9. Re:If ancient people taught us anything... by A+nonymous+Coward · 2012-07-12 15:16 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Tablets! Good grief, you apple fanboiz never give up.
  
  --
  Infuriate left and right
The Long Now has already looked at this... by Bookwyrm · 2012-07-12 11:33 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Cheaper way to do it by meglon · 2012-07-12 11:35 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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Also watch this film... by djnanite · 2012-07-12 11:36 · Score: 5, Informative

"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 by Konster · 2012-07-12 11:42 · Score: 5, Funny

They really need to fuck with the future archaeologists by writing everything in Klingon.
Nuclear waste will be the crude oil of the future! by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2012-07-12 11:46 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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