• A Million-Year Hard Disk made out of sapphire
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[quote] DUBLIN—It seems these days that no data storage medium lasts long before becoming obsolete—does anyone remember Sony's Memory Stick? So have pity for the builders of nuclear waste repositories, who are trying to preserve records of what they've buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years. 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 told the Euroscience Open Forum here, is to provide "information for future archaeologists." But, he concedes: "We have no idea what language to write it in." 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. Finland, France, and Sweden are the furthest advanced in the complicated process of finding a geologically suitable site, persuading local communities to accept it, and getting regulatory approval. Sweden's waste management company, SKB, for example, spent 30 years finding the right site and is now waiting for the government's green light to begin excavation. It plans to start loading in waste a decade from now, and will be filling its underground pits for up to 50 years. While the designers of such repositories say they are confident that the waste will be safely incarcerated, the most uncontrollable factor is future archaeologists or others with a penchant for digging. Archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf of Linnaeus University in Sweden showed meeting participants an early attempt at warning future generations: a roughly 1-meter-wide stone block with the words "Caution - Do Not Dig" written in English with some smaller text explaining that there is nuclear waste below. But who knows what language its discoverers will understand in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years—or even if they will be human beings? Holtorf points out that a much earlier attempt to warn off future excavations, the Egyptian pyramids, were looted within a generation. "The future will be radically different from today," says archaeologist Anders Högberg, who is also from Linnaeus University. "We have no idea how humans will think." In 2010, ANDRA began a project to address these issues, says Charton. It brings together specialists from as wide a selection of fields as possible, including materials scientists, archivists, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and even artists—"to see if they have some answers to our questions." The initial goal is to identify all the approaches possible; in 2014 or 2015, the group hopes to narrow down the possibilities. The sapphire disk is one product of that effort. It's made from two thin disks, about 20 centimeters across, of industrial sapphire. On one side, text or images are etched in platinum—Charton says a single disk can store 40,000 miniaturized pages—and then the two disks are molecularly fused together. All a future archaeologist would need to read them is a microscope. The disks have been immersed in acid to test their durability and to simulate ageing. Charton says they hope to demonstrate a lifetime of 10 million years. Researchers have some time to work on the problem because the repositories will probably not be filled and sealed up until the end of this century. "Each country has its own ideas, but we need to get a common approach," says SKB's Erik Setzman. "We technical people can't solve this problem ourselves. We need help from other parts of society."[/quote] [url]http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/a-million-year-hard-disk.html?ref=hp[/url]
Excellent, I can finally store my porn forever, my legacy to the generations that come after me.
In a million years when the ruins of our earth is scoured for evidence of our lost civilisation by an alien race, they will discover this hard disk, and the untold amounts of nyan cats and rage faces that it holds - and they will believe these to be our finest works of art.
[QUOTE=scurr;36765004]In a million years when the ruins of our earth is scoured for evidence of our lost civilisation by an alien race, they will discover this hard disk, and the untold amounts of nyan cats and rage faces that it holds - and they will believe these to be our finest works of art.[/QUOTE] And porn. Mainly porn. Also, this would be useful for servers, and data centers.
Surely writing it in binary would be the bets bet...
We shall store the finest porn on it for generations to come to!
[QUOTE=Scotchair;36765197]Surely writing it in binary would be the bets bet...[/QUOTE] Humans 10000 years from now or aliens millions of years from now probably won't use the same machine code as us making binary useless.
Reading the title, for a brief instant I thought they [I]found[/I] a million-years old hard drive. That'd be some SCP Foundation shit right there.
I might be wrong but Platinum decays is far far far far less time.
[QUOTE=Empty_Shadow;36765237]Humans 10000 years from now or aliens millions of years from now probably won't use the same machine code as us making binary useless.[/QUOTE] Solution: bury a ThinkPad next to the disk. Those things can survive anything, even space and getting to space in one piece.
[QUOTE=Empty_Shadow;36765237]Humans 10000 years from now or aliens millions of years from now probably won't use the same machine code as us making binary useless.[/QUOTE] Regardless of what code machines use in the future, binary is pretty fundamental. The Voyager Golden Record contains some information in binary because it is assumed any alien civilization advanced enough to decipher whatever is on the record would at the very least be able to interpret binary.
Imagine in like 2000 thousand years, the disk leaking into the net, or whatever else there will be at that time. That will be fascinating. Imagine that, to some future people, we are those ancients they want to know so much about.
[QUOTE=kidwithsword;36765331]Regardless of what code machines use in the future, binary is pretty fundamental. The Voyager Golden Record contains some information in binary because it is assumed any alien civilization advanced enough to decipher whatever is on the record would at the very least be able to interpret binary.[/QUOTE] Binary is pretty damn fundamental (true/false, on/off, etc.), but encoding the information is much harder. How is an alien civilisation supposed to know we encode our information in octects? (We could easily be using 2/4/8/16/32/64/128/etc.), even if they can decode binary into decimal, how are they supposed to map that to something usable (Guess what 01100001 stands for). That's what I kind of find funny about all these nuclear waste signs, a future civilisation with enough technology to decode these disks, should also have things like geiger counters, they'll already know the stuff is radioactive before decoding the disks.
[QUOTE=jimhowl33t;36765284]Reading the title, for a brief instant I thought they [I]found[/I] a million-years old hard drive. That'd be some SCP Foundation shit right there.[/QUOTE] What if we are not the first generation of human beings to evolve and think of this idea? :tinfoil:
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;36765563]Binary is pretty damn fundamental (true/false, on/off, etc.), but encoding the information is much harder. How is an alien civilisation supposed to know we encode our information in octects? (We could easily be using 2/4/8/16/32/64/128/etc.), even if they can decode binary into decimal, how are they supposed to map that to something usable (Guess what 01100001 stands for). That's what I kind of find funny about all these nuclear waste signs, a future civilisation with enough technology to decode these disks, should also have things like geiger counters, they'll already know the stuff is radioactive before decoding the disks.[/QUOTE] yes, but what if they misinterpret the signs as something of a religious monument (it looks a bit like an angel, which they could have gotten from some stored early books), or literally anything else. Even then, they may not know the full dangers of radiation or what radioactive waste might do.
[QUOTE=Eltro102;36765704]yes, but what if they misinterpret the signs as something of a religious monument (it looks a bit like an angel, which they could have gotten from some stored early books), or literally anything else. Even then, they may not know the full dangers of radiation or what radioactive waste might do.[/QUOTE] That's possible, but if they misinterpret it that much, then how would something like a disk of binary instructions help them? They need to be a certain technological level to understand the disk [b]and[/b] the dangers of radioactive material (If they understand one and not the other, it could be even worse. If they can decipher the disk but not understand what radioactive material could do, they might be more interested in it for experimental reasons, etc.)
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;36765750]If they can decipher the disk but not understand what radioactive material could do, they might be more interested in it for experimental reasons, etc.)[/QUOTE] Wow, that's a good point. If something like this were found, it would make sense for the finders to bring in a lot of people to analyze it. They would also probably dig around the area more for similar objects before anyone could interpret what it says.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;36765750]That's possible, but if they misinterpret it that much, then how would something like a disk of binary instructions help them? They need to be a certain technological level to understand the disk [b]and[/b] the dangers of radioactive material (If they understand one and not the other, it could be even worse. If they can decipher the disk but not understand what radioactive material could do, they might be more interested in it for experimental reasons, etc.)[/QUOTE] Maybe design it so that it has a durable video and audio player, or an easily-interpretable interface with directions for use, or at least have hieroglyphics depicting the "shining poison" and how it would be poisonous to living things.
Chances are that since we have developed storage capacity and device numbers that go into billions of billions, math, language and numbers will not change as much as in the past or at least will be available as "old information" in the future. Hell there are videos almost a hundred years old on youtube. Additionally, anyone able to digg far enough into the earth to break into our nuclear waste disposals probably has the technology to scout it beforehand anyway. [editline]14th July 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=ironman17;36765968]Maybe design it so that it has a durable video and audio player, or an easily-interpretable interface with directions for use, or at least have hieroglyphics depicting the "shining poison" and how it would be poisonous to living things.[/QUOTE] I remember reading an article that we should make up a myth about the nuclear sites and a cult following it since cult and myth is what preserved the longest in human knowledge, myths of the great flooding for example date back more than 3000 years. [editline]14th July 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=TheDecryptor;36765750]That's possible, but if they misinterpret it that much, then how would something like a disk of binary instructions help them? They need to be a certain technological level to understand the disk [b]and[/b] the dangers of radioactive material (If they understand one and not the other, it could be even worse. If they can decipher the disk but not understand what radioactive material could do, they might be more interested in it for experimental reasons, etc.)[/QUOTE] Erm most likely there will not be formulas and building instructions on this but rather "Hey yo this shit is dangerous" so IF they decipher it they will not experiment with it, after all we are not talking about a bunch of 12 year olds here.
I would probably use some form of well-known symbol to write on the tablet(s), such as an exclamation point or the radioactive material symbol. Regardless of what language we speak, most of us use the same symbols in our work/writing, so while these symbols might not be around for thousands of years, they'll sure as hell be known about much longer than any language.
[video=youtube;qpMvS1Q1sos]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos[/video] ?
some caveman in the ice age after a nuclear war finds it and uses it to carve seal meat he then proceeds to shatter it to pieces for his spears
[QUOTE=TheTailor25;36765119]And porn. Mainly porn. Also, this would be useful for servers, and data centers.[/QUOTE] Not very cost-effective when a had drive costs 25 grand a pop.
We need to store the Mass Effect Trilogy on there so future civilizations know how to defeat the Reapers.
[QUOTE=Empty_Shadow;36765237]Humans 10000 years from now or aliens millions of years from now probably won't use the same machine code as us making binary useless.[/QUOTE] We don't speak Babylonian, but we can understand it, even if it's useless. It's not like we can guess how humanity will communicate a millenium in the future, but it's assumed that even as advanced as we may be, we wouldn't forget the freaking basic of computable machinery, especially since we have now millions of works, studies and manuals talking about binary. It's not like just because we STOP using something, we instantly forget about it: we didn't with ancient greek and latin, and the amount of work on computers of this century (and those to come) is hundreds of time more enormous than the entire pre-medieval literary production.
I read the title and thought that they found a million year old hard drive. Got excited for caveman porn.
Did anyone bother to read the article? They don't even sound to be "hard-disks" as in the context of computers. They aren't written in binary. [quote]On one side, text or images are etched in platinum—Charton says a single disk can store 40,000 miniaturized pages[/quote] Come on facepunch, read the fucking article for once.
we r all human bengs and deservd to lived
[QUOTE=Brickhead;36768178]we r all human bengs and deservd to lived[/QUOTE] wtf hi
Now while the Bohr model of the atom is severely outdated now, I'm sure if you drew one any species that had a firm grasp of the nature of the atom and the universe would understand what you were trying to convey. So why not just engrave a massive atom onto the disc with an arrow pointing towards fission products (smaller atoms (and neutrons)). I reckon that'd be fairly universally understood.
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