1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility

May 03, 2013 89 Replies

These days, if you want to preserve our whole cultural heritage to the future generations, the only way is to copy every 2-5 year to the best available medium at that time. Of course, this requires a constantly working society (no centuries breaks between Roman and medieval European societies).

In previous centuries, monks did the copying, these days electronic devices with short life time will do the copying.

I started my career within IT when 80 column punched cards, 5/8 channel paper tapes and 7/9 channel 1/2" magnetic tapes were common. These days, it is not of a problem to read a punched card or a strip of a 1/2 inch paper tape on simple flatbed scanner.

The advantage of DNA here is that one can easily and cheaply make

10,000 copies and scatter them about, and not just in big cities. Caves in the desert are traditional.

Joe Gwinn

But keep it dry. Silica does dissolve in water, slowly. Information carried in surface pits will soon disappear.

I suppose the silica tablets could be stored in caves on the Moon.

Joe Gwinn

Go look at the medium I posted a link to.

Easy to keep a copy and a full redundant and even do that redundantly across geographic sites. The hard part is the data element retrieval machinery. That gantry system has to be low consumption, long term life span motors and sealed bearing gantry systems. THAT hardware would require maintenance. Easier to move the retrieval head than the columns of stacks of media.

READ the article, Mr. Quick Glance! The data is written to internal structures.

Optical cubes would be where a multi-layered version would go.

Thanks for the link. Of course, it's a WORM (write once, read maybe) device with no way to erase or correct mistakes. I guess that's a good thing for 1000 year storage.

According to the article, the current density is 40MB/sq-in or

0.04GB/sq-in. If it could be done in 3D, that would be 64GB/cubic-inch or 0.064TB/cubic-inch. The internet archive.org project currently stores about 10 Petabytes (10,000TB) of data (without error correction), which would require 156,000 cubic inches to store, or approximately a 6ft on a side cube. Not very compact, but it might be workable depending on how the read lasers are arranged.
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

Polar location on Luna is a great place to site this kind of item. All you need is sunshields, and insulation on the bottom.

And how will the optical surfaces fare as they dissolve over 1,000 years? Focus will become blurry and veiled over time. Not for nothing is water called the universal solvent.

Joe Gwinn

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Yer an idiot. The Mayans saw far further back than a punk like you. this planet is good for a long time.

You are an idiot, and you obviously did not read the article.

It is impervious to radiation, you dumb dork wanna be.

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Sorry; not even this planet is good for that... ..give qualified "maybe" for 100 year period (no excessive RAD dosages for one).

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The past does not predict the future.

*You* obviously did not read the article; it says nothing about radiation resistance. Google "silica ionizing radiation". Even very mild dosage can add up over 1ky, especially if granite is a major component of the proposed site.

Mark L. Fergerson

I fear that this rather obvious idea is beyond him. The profanity is a dead giveaway that he actually suspects his own incompetence. No need to be so defensive otherwise.

For some reason, there are a lot of people with big egos and low itelligence that want to believe these marketing lies. Never ceases to amaze me. It is also fascinating that the most significant (and well-known in the data archival community) problem is blatantly ignored: The equipment for reading the storage devices needs to survive as well and the software for processing it and hardware it runs on too. That means this hardware has to stay in production, as these components will have a shelf-life well below 30 years.

Arno

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Yeah, I know. At least one other in this thread exhibits similar tendencies.

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I made the assumption that the robots themselves would be the "read hardware". I suggested (as an extreme example) a big slab of stone/ osmiridium/whatever inscribed with all the instructions they'd need to maintain the facility and themselves as literal zeroes and ones, to be read by the robots themselves.

Crude, but considering the requirements, suitable.

Mark L. Fergerson

Joerg schrieb:

Hello,

I dont think of some (still impressive) ruins left, I think of a complete functional building with water tight roofs and walls without cracks to look throu.

Bye

Close up an upper arch on this one and you have it:

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I think that's an aquaduct at Nimes in France. Maison Carree would also work, with even less effort:

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A smaller edition in Croatia, maybe they had some budget cuts in Rome:

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Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Has anyone suggested the use of nudged electrons?

( Arthur C. Clarke moment: I intended this as a facetious comment referring to an ancient SciFi short story, Unfortunately, when I asked Google to see if it could find the title and author, _this_ turned up instead:

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Irony ain't what it used to be. )

Frank McKenney

Here, in this little Bay, Full of tumultuous life and great repose, Where, twice a day, The purposeless, gay ocean comes and goes, Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town, I sit me down. For want of me the world's course will not fail: When all its work is done, the lie shall rot; The truth is great, and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not. -- Magna Est Veritas / Coventry Patmore

At this time, this would either requirting hard-coding all possible modes this can break down with recovery instructions (infeasible) or true AI in there (likely infeasible as well). Maybe in a few hundred years something like this project could be undertaken, but today they do not even know how to statically mark a nuclear waste facility in a way suitable for warn people away for the forseeable future.

Arno

Maybe I'm missing something here.

Why would you want to guarantee something for this long.

If you are trying to provide for civilisation disaster recovery then surely it is better to maintain something that can reboot the world within a gene ration so that the survivors can remember and therefore understand, the poi nt of putting the effort in. If you wait 50 generations, chances are they w ill reboot themselves and will not need our stuff.

If you want to get rid of radioactive stuff with a long half life how about designing a container that can survive a journey to the bottom of the mari anna trench.

I'd go lo-tech. Etches in stainless steel for example. Maybe gold plate them afterwards for an extra protective layer.

Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------

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