Slashdot Mirror
Billion Year Storage Media
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."
But as we know, you can't trust atoms.
They make up everything.
That's nice and all but can we trust our data formats to stay static for that long? Having the data but being unable to open it seems rather useless to me.
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. They will think that we died out because we were egocentric egoistic maniacs who do not care about their future and legacy. Furthermore, they will see it as direct evidence that we preserved nonsense about our pity lives in a super material, while other knowledge was not stored at all. But maybe, they just come up with the idea that the data must be somewhat scrambled, as it makes no sense at all.
Wow, a slashdot article with a straight-up link to the paper. No multi page article with embedded flash ads, no 'science journalism' minced down through a chain of successively dumber news outlets, no PR bullshit. Just the paper.
Submitter, I'm impressed.
The authors describe a medium that will hold information for 1million to 1 billion years, yet they publish their results on PAPER!
Either they don't trust their own material will last as long as good old paper or they expect irrelevance to do its work faster than wear and tear.
Otherwise, they would publish a "tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride", not a "paper".
... if much of the world's tungsten ore was laced with silicon nitride "contaminants". Alexandria all over again.
... a high-speed object collides with it. Because on a billion-year timescale the universe is a shooting gallery and everything is a target.
Maybe its different when bonded to tungsten, but silicon nitride by itself is extremely brittle, almost as brittle as glass.
Modern natural gas furnaces use silicone nitride hot surface igniters (glows red hot and ignites the gas). These igniters will shatter when dropped as little as 1 foot onto concrete.
The entire concept of storing data for a billion years is nothing but ego. It would be akin to our finding a cave with forty-five thousand little paintings of dots, squares and circles - all perfectly preserved. What the hell does it mean? Curious and interesting to speculate on perhaps, but data? Not so much.
We've been historically terrible at deciphering ancient languages without something to help link it to a current language (such as the Rosetta Stone).
All this talk of data formats spanks of a very digital future, which I think we have a very hard time of predicting. The linked article is very binary... the grooves they explain can have "two or more" readable states, and their use of a QR code is interesting since it's an analog representation of an absurdly hard to decipher technology (without a key, as parent indicates should be the first thing). How would we encode data on these things? ASCII encoded English? Aliens would have to decode a language and then translate it. There's got to be something easier.
At least the QR code is ultimately a 2D picture, though. I'd imagine any thorough storage over that period of time will have to start with something extremely basic. Sculptures or 2D visual instructions that clearly lay things out. I think you could probably describe a mathematical encoding mechanism visually, but a language would take some work. The Arecibo message is somewhat famous for being a digital message that is notoriously difficult to interpret, and that's by people who would actually recognize some of the glyphs. The picture attached to the 1970s Pioneer vessels is higher resolution and easier to identify, and the audio/visual nature of the Voyager Golden Record is also interesting. But still the idea that these will be intelligently deciphered by themselves is tiny.
It's impressive that they're building something to last... they're just going to have to spend a lot of time figuring out what to put on it. Should lead to some interesting conversations.
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.
Sometimes I wonder if we will ever stumble across a one billion year old time capsule from a sentient species that previously lived on this planet. It's safe to say that sufficient time would erase any trace of even an advanced civilization with the exception of anything that was purposely preserved. Yes, that would be cool.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Excellent thesis and a most delightful dedication!
A few salient points from this thesis, for the Slashdot crowd: ... you must properly catalog things ... they must be properly rendered
- Accumulation: knowing what to keep and what to toss
- Distribution: where/how to keep copies
- Digital stewardship: maintaining objects isn't enough
- Long term access means more than just saving bits
Convolved on this are problems with copyright, fair use, payment for archives, orphaned collections...
Then there's the cost of creating and maintaining a long term digital repository.
Librarians have done a terrific job with our printed archives. Who will become our digital librarians?
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.
Archaeology demonstrates that survival over long periods of time is quite random and rare, and does not correlate well to the intent of the creator to preserve the creation for long periods of time. There are always unanticipated threats to the existence of these artifacts: war, natural disasters, rot, rust, erosion, language obsolescence, to name a few. The longer the time period, the more likely that some catastrophe will befall any given artifact.
Works that have survived for millennia tend to be items that were copied prolifically. A few of the many copies or items survive the ravages of time, but not because the creators anticipated all of the things that could destroy their work.
For example, none of the original manuscripts of the Bible have been found, as far as we know. But because those manuscripts were copied and translated so often, we have reasonably accurate copies of those original texts.
A million years from now, nothing much will be left of these new storage media. They will only survive if people in the future consider the information important enough to copy it to new media, and translate it into the new formats of the time.
Works especially well if it's something that pisses her off.