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Billion Year Storage Media

Posted by samzenpus on from the built-to-last dept.

Thorfinn.au writes "Even though the data density of digital information storage has increased tremendously over the last few decades, the data longevity is limited to only a few decades. If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years. In this paper a medium is investigated consisting of tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time."

6 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re: what about the data format? by AvitarX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Frequency analysis and non compressed formats

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  2. Re:Data by martyros · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most of our data are totally uninteresting pieces of garbage. Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments.

    Said by someone who obviously has never done much looking at history. The fact that "uninteresting pieces of garbage", that either everyone knew and assumed or thought didn't need to be said, were *not* written down, makes it a lot harder to understand the context in which the things we *do* have were said. Having a handful of people's full FB / twitter records will be a treasure trove of information for 50th-century historians trying to figure out what life was actually like in the 20th century.

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  3. Wouldn't it be ironic... by mlosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... if much of the world's tungsten ore was laced with silicon nitride "contaminants". Alexandria all over again.

  4. Re:Nice atomic structure by bobbied · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I knew a lady who had a therapist and a nurse in her list of personalities. She could lock herself up for treatment..

    But I get your point...

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  5. Where would you store it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you were to preserve this for the next species that evolves here to find, where should you store it?

    If you make it easy to find and retrieve, then you run the risk of a primitive culture destroying it as heretical once it's decoded. That risk still exists today.

    If you hide it, it may never be found.

    Monoliths on the moon are the only thing I can think of at the moment.

  6. DNA Data Storage by structural_biologist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Last year George Church and colleagues published a paper in Science describing data storage using DNA (Church, Gao, and Kosuri. 2012. Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA. Science 337: 1628. doi:10.1126/science.1226355) . While perhaps not lasting billions of years, given that we've been able to read DNA from creatures that existed millenia ago (whose DNA was definitely stored in non-ideal conditions), DNA data storage could potentially preserve data for very long periods of time.