1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility

I asked a co-worker who was fluent in Chinese about this once. If I remember right, he said that he could read written Chinese as old as a couple of thousand years and it would pretty much make sense. He also said that he could understand written Japanese, but if he tried to speak it, someone fluent in spoken Japanese wouldn't understand him; the pronunciation would be wrong.

I figured it was a customer lock-in tactic, like EBCDIC and Word .doc .

Pic related:

Matt Roberds

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This might sound weird, but consider posting in rec.arts.sf.science where the topic has been discussed by fairly tech-savvy people re: blunders in SF stories about data that lasts for very long times to sustain widely dispersed long-lived cultures.

First, when you say "autonomous" do you mean absolutely no external resources (parts, materials, software etc.) are presumed available? If so, that implies no external sources of corruption can get in- the facility is must be water/gas/light/(unknown)-tight. What will the facility use for power? I'm thinking not just storage medium degradation but data corruption (viruses, language changes re: obsolescence and so on) due to outside influences as well as say stray radiation from a plutonium power source or similar.

Threat assessment has been mentioned. Suppose someone side-channel attacks you by modulating the sunlight falling on your solar collectors with a virus...

Consider corruption of data during read/write cycles in anything from quipu through punch cards and electronic storage media to (I think) Speff's laser-engraved porcelain. It's the "telephone game" problem with just one player.

Already answered with bit flipping due to cosmic rays, metal migration, glass creep, and so on. Not good for a few decades much less centuries. Then there was radioactive ceramic used to encapsulate memory chips. Oops!

Yep.

Well, think like a customer-service tech (one with brains). Your end- users, the robots- what tech are they built with? What conditions do they have to survive for a thousand years- temp-controlled low- pressure argon atmosphere?

What do your robots use for eyes and ears? If your primary archive is a big slab of granite/basalt/osmiridium engraved with literal zeroes and ones corruption is very difficult to envision barring geological events that would threaten the integrity of the facility, but can the robots read it?

Mark L. Fergerson

Ummm... parchment *is* leather. Well, hide, at least. It's an animal product, not paper.

Latin isn't a dead language. It is still the official language of the Vatican City state, spoken daily.

True, it is an animal product. But some of the dead sea scrolls were written on papyrus and that is not animal-based.

No semiconductor will continue to work for 1,000 years - the carefully crafted variations in impurity concentrations (the doping) will diffuse out to uniformity long before. The smaller the features, the faster this will happen. The lower the temperature, the slower the diffusion, but this isn't much help over 1000 years, even at arctic temperatures.

As for long-term storage of information, two thoughts come to mind. First, for the millennium celebrations, The New York Times decided to make and widely disperse a umber to time capsules; these being intended to be opened 1,000 years hence. Basically nothing worked except nickel sheets with natural-language texts engraved into the surface using an electron beam. The text was rendered in English and a number of other languages, so it would also serve as a Rosetta Stone. Anyway, the whole process was described in a set of articles in the NYT Magazine published in 1999.

More recently, the ability to convert arbitrary text into DNA, and to read the text back gives us a way to store huge amounts of binary information for millennia.

One can also store bulk binary on nickel sheet by writing code blocks in hexadecimal, with embedded error correcting codes.

Joe Gwinn

Some links:

I recall some SF story I read a long time ago with a similar line. It was about a beehive style human culture maintained by self-repairing machines (much as described here) And then the machines began to stop. Naturally hilarity ensues...

I would point out that there is a difference here between maintaining digital data for 1000 years (hard enough to do) and maintaining FIRMWARE for 1000 years.

In the first case you store the data (say in a refractory cubic transparent crystal that was built up crystal layer by crystal layer using defects to store data. The data is only in the CENTER of the object so even if the outside is dirty and degraded for whatever reason, The damage can be polished off and the data read. But reading is entirely up to the skilz of the future generation.

Firmware, on the other hand implies that you are constantly reading and using the data. This is a whole different kettle of worms. Now the life expectance and reliability of the READER becomes involved! I found it interesting that the millennium clock does not display time, only keeps it! When a human enters the cave (whatever) THEY have to pull the weight that runs the display. And then the display shuts off until the next person visits. That greatly reduces all display wear etc. But for firmware running a robotic facility reading would have to be more or less regularly.

or more compact symbologies like QR or matrix codes.

They can raise the dead, which I guess now includes dead languages. I'm Jewish and we did a better job with the Hebrew language when the state of Israel was founded in 1947.

Tt appears that there is no official language for Vatican City, and that they only use Latin for major documents and official grafitti: Looking at the Vatican web site, I don't see Latin as one of the offered languages: Only the vulgar languages of Italian, English, French, German, and Spannish are offered. I think it is safe to bury Latin (again).

Drivel: My earliest clue that things might not be as they seem was when I discovered that nobody speaks Latin in Latin America.

Also:

Does the 10,000 year clock come with a warranty?

At this time, there is a 16 second difference between GPS atomic clock time and UTC, which is based on astronomical time. They were identical on Jan 6, 1980 and are diverging at the rate of about 2 seconds per year. Ignoring variations in the earths speed of rotation: in 1000 years, the two clocks might be 2000 seconds or 33 hours different.

I was totally surprised this week when I worked with several Chinese scientists at our university. I asked why they don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese when among themselves. "He is from Shanghai and we are from the north so we can't understand each other at all".

Only the effectiveness of DNA is the hyper redundancy of constant reproduction of backups by species reproduction. Even so the data slowly drifts. And most interesting would be what kind of monster species robot firmware DNA would create! :-)

Wouldn't gold be better than nickel?

DNA is actually pretty stable, if properly packaged. They got DNA from Ötzi the iceman, who had been in the glacier for 5,300 years:

It would, but would attract tomb raiders. Not the pretty kind.

Joe Gwinn

• I have seen scrolls made with leather; the newest one was a mere 800 years old. How the older ones were "protected" is relevant only to indicate possible methods of long term storage.

Not under constant use, of course :)

Biological systems are robustly error correcting on all levels. On the highest level, evolution simply discards unsuccessful DNA: it dies.

On the lowest levels, DNA is patched, copied, bundled and moved by numerous cellular proteins (all of which are, themselves, constantly being smashed up, recycled and re-synthesized directly from the very DNA they serve; as far as I know, *no* non-structural chemicals inside the cell are permanent, they are constantly being remade!).

Suppose a DNA mistake occurs anyway. Structural errors simply throw a wrench in the works; the cell sacrifices itself for the greater good (apoptosis). If the result is a coding error, the associated proteins or whatever will change; most of these changes (that don't already result in destruction) are apparently fairly innocuous, as there are a lot of positions in a lot of proteins which have little functional impact.

If one of those changes happens to relate to immune system codes, however, the body's immune system comes in and snuffs it out. Cancer is constantly developing in our bodies; almost all of it fades out on its own or is attacked. The unlucky ones that sneak past those defenses, and find the mutations that allow unlimited growth, are the only ones we have trouble with today.

The most striking difference between cells and automatons, besides the complexity (as far as I know, no one has yet engineered a computer operating system where the code constantly rewrites itself, from a parametric, self-modifying source, as it copies and executes that very code), is the simple fact that we don't have a freaking clue how to do it efficiently.

Consider the amount of raw materials and power required to operate a machine shop, continuously, turning out parts not just for the robots doing the work, but replacement parts for the machines making them. Then consider the amount of power required to operate the foundry to melt and recast the metal parts, off-cuts and waste. Finally, consider the amount of power required to operate a complete chemical recycling plant, to recover metal from the inevitable oxides generated in the foundry, machine shop and from general corrosion, plus recycling and reformulating all the lubricants, fuels, and other waste products produced in the process.

And now try running your self-replicating factory from a robust power source like thermocouples!

The turnover of most cells apparently is on the order of 10 years,

Tim

had to snip

Tada!

Some of the scrolls were preserved, since they were burned. By carefully unrolling some burned scrolls, the text could actually be recovered.

What is the difference between medieval and 1930-2013 tomb raiders ??

Some of these tomb raiders tried to move the artifacts to a "safe" location like Berlin that was destroyed in WW2.

Nickel oxidizes. Gold does not. Better still is Platinum, which would be my choice.