1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility

One more time, OP is talking about a sef-maintaining robot (better make that a robot society).

?-)

Tunnel diodes made in the 1960s are already rediffusing into useless globs of germanium or silicon. I think the dopants making all the p-n junctions i n those ROMS you suggest will also rediffuse over the centuries. Semiconduc tors as we know them might be ruled out unless the robots can operate a fab

-line.

Thanks. The 2000 seconds is correct. However, it should be 33 minutes, not hours. Sorry(tm).

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That's one way to read between the lines. I just re-read all the OP's postings in this thread and found in "This is about media being used during these 1000 years as a source of firmware and operating systems to keep the robotic facility functional." Note the word "media".

His answer to my comments on the need for data verification in : "The idea is to make the cold store for humans autonomously due to a lack of trust in human reliability. If the autonomous facility works, then there is no need for anyone to verify the data. Verification is done via checksums internally. Ideally it would be in a remote place, forgotten and eventually discovered, either by chance, or by radio signals from the facility in case of malfunction or at a set date like in 1000 year when technology is expected to be able to scan/upload the minds of the frozen humans. Actually I think 200 years probably suffice."

One does not normally refer to components, parts, firmware, etc as "media". I can't tell what he's planning to accomplish with a 1000 year self maintaining robot. The 1000 year self maintaining robot is not the problem. It's whatever the robot is suppose to be doing for

1000 years is the problem. Again, reading between the lines, it looks like a robotic Alcor: or if the body or brain can somehow be reduced to data, a large data time capsule. It's the political, social, and financial aspects of operating such a robot, which is what I find interesting.

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My computers POST can tell me if there's a memory, keyboard, floppy, disk, etc error. What's infeasible about identifying defective parts and replacing them? Sure there are limits, but we can try to find a solution with reasonable chance for success.

Even humans can't solve all problems.

Bernhard

Da nada. I spent much of my working time in the last 30+ years looking for others slips and things. That amount of practice must produce some little bit of skill.

?;-)

That puts a really different spin on it. I wonder of OP has real "Silicon Beach", "The Two Faces of Tomorrow", Dr. Asimov's Robot Series, or any similar books.

?-)

Wow. Is that from magnetic tape or paper tape?

?-)

You computer's POST cannot tell you if the POST itself is broken. It has a table of specific checks (i.e. hardcoded ones), other problems will not even be atempted to be diagnosed.

Depends on the intelligence and experience of the human involved. But you are right, and I have been pointing oout that this very project is very likely amont the problems humans cannot solve.

Arno

I don't know. What I do know is that he's solving the wrong problem. I don't believe it's possible to achieve 1000 year reliability for electronics and mechanisms. If it moves, it breaks... unless something extraordinary (and expensive) is employed. The list of probable hazards are just too great for such a device. If a species cannot change and evolve effectively, environmental changes will guarantee extinction. The same can be said of all mechanisms, including electronics.

Mother nature, Microsoft, and satellite technology have provided examples the long term survivability that work. Mother nature offers evolution, where a species adapts to changing conditions. Microsoft has Windoze updates, which similarly adapts a know buggy operating system into a somewhat less buggy operating system. The satellite industry has deal with the inaccessibility of satellite firmware and in flight RAM damage with reloadable firmware. None of the products of these technologies would operate for very long in their original form without adaptation.

Building a sealed system also has its problems. Sealed environments have been attempted with limited success. The story is always the same. They get 99.9999% there, and the whole thing collapses due to some unexpected and uncontrolled trivial oversight. The closest electronic parallel is again the satellite technology, where environmental considerations (space junk, cosmic rays, tin whiskers, solar cell deterioration, etc) cannot effectively be repaired and eventually kill the satellite. Sometimes, it is politically expedient to spend huge amounts of money to repair satellites (i.e. Hubble space telescope), but those are rare. If Hubble had been in geosynchronous orbit, the space shuttle would not have been able to reach it and Hubble would have died on arrival.

Therefore, in my never humble opinion, the trick to making electronics survive beyond their "normal" lifetimes is to perform constant and regular updates. That doesn't mean an infinite supply of spare parts or 3D printing extended to its logical extreme. It means small but constant improvements in the design. For firmware, that could be improvements through self modifying code as in "The Adolescence of P1". The trick is to follow the example of evolution and not make any radical changes. The risk of failure with small changes are small and reversible. The risks with dramatic improvements in technology are large and probably not reversible.

Applied to the OP's automated Alcor system is difficult, but not impossible. For example, parallel redundancy is an obvious way to improve reliability, but also a good way to implement evolutionary electronics. If there are 10 processors running majority logic to reach a decision or perform a function, there would not be a loss of function if one of those processors engaged in evolutionary experiments and improvements. If the code or hardware changes are successful, then the remaining 9 processors could be slowly replaced.

Exactly how create evolutionary electronics is probably worthy of a Nobel Prize. It may also be our doom as it would likely involve risks such as nano technology "gray goo" or a Forbin Project style computer takeover. The principle is simple enough, but the devil is in all the details. In its fully automated form, it also can be capable of initiating resource exhaustion. If it needs some rare earth element to function, and it has access to the commodities futures market computers, it could easily corner the market in that element for itself. Lots of other things that could go wrong.

The technology to make evolutionary computing work is well beyond my level of expertise. I suspect it's going to be a priority if we ever establish space colonies as the problems are similar. What I do know is that building something with a 1000 year reliability is not going to be a usable solution.

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I don't agree. There is certainly more chance of an autonomous robotic system lasting for 1000 years than trying to organise some way of getting humans to maintain his cryogenic body storage system over that length of time.

He did say that cost was no object.

That stuff doesn't matter if it can repair what breaks.

That's just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples of species that have not evolved at all over 1000 years and have survived fine.

No, most obviously with the static storage of data using a sufficiently stable storage mechanism.

That has in fact lasted MUCH longer than 1000 years already with some of the ways of doing that.

That's just one way its handled that problem.

But hasn't even managed 100 years, let alone 1000.

Yes, that's a rather better example, but none of that was ever designed to last for 1000 years and in fact we know it won't because the satellites won't even stay there for that long even if the electronics does work for that long, and we know it wont.

Adaption is just one approach.

Clearly an autonomous robot manufacturing facility can just keep making more of what fails whenever it fails as long as the raw materials are always available.

All approaches have their problems.

That's why we have engineers, to solve them.

That's just biological systems. Closed data storage systems work fine.

Doesn't happen with closed data storage systems.

And even if they don't, the satellite will eventually return to earth and burn up in the process.

That's all irrelevant to whats possible on earth tho.

We know that there are plenty of examples of stuff that's lasted a lot longer than 1000 years.

All irrelevant to whats feasible on earth.

That's just one way. Even just replacement of what dies is another obvious approach.

No need to improve it.

It would be a hell of a lot safer to not even attempt any improvements, just replace what dies.

Still a lot safer to just replace what dies.

In fact the rare earths arent actually rare at all.

But not if you just replace what breaks and have enough of the raw materials included in the original that you have calculated will be needed to replace what breaks and say have 10 times that for safety.

But replacing what breaks isnt.

Its worked fine quite a few times in the past now.

I beg to differ! Somewhat different bugs, sure. Somewhat less buggy, surely not!

Jeroen Belleman

All but the last link broke due to word wrap. If you can't read headers i am using Agent 6. One of the better respected news (and email) clients.

Carets "" ain't a perfect solution. Fortunately Jow Gwinn also placed them on separate lines making using text selection reasonable easy. Using copy and paste worked just fine.

?-)

Ok, not the best example. The problem is that features and functions get added to software faster than bug fixes. The inevitable result is a product with cancerous growth, feature bloat, and plenty of bugs. I sometime suspect that this is intentional, as the only reason the users upgrade to the next latest version is in the futile hope that it will have fewer bugs. MS made that mistake with XP, which is actually quite good and reasonable usable, causing large corporate users to ask "why bother to upgrade"? 13 years later, it's still going strong, despite numerous failed attempts by MS to kill it. Certainly, they're not going to make that mistake again.

However, I'll make it easy for someone to prove me wrong. Just name me one software package or major application that either continues to be sold in its original version, or which has become smaller, faster, or both? Offhand, I can't think of any that are even close. Evolution and growth drives the software industry, because it works.

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a

globs of germanium or silicon. I think the dopants making all the p-n junctions in those ROMS you suggest will also rediffuse over the centuries. Semiconductors as we know them might be ruled out unless the robots can operate a fab-line.

Yes, also mining and smelting of silicon and the various dopants like, boron, phosphorus, gallium, arsenic, indium, antinomy and so on. This is getting to need a small very technical society here (a point i tried to make before).

?-)

Why? I'm constantly replacing dried out electrolytic caps from antique radios. Anything that moves (pots, controls, rheostats, variable caps, speaker cones, dial cord, etc) are constant sources of maintenance problems. Any switch or relay without hermetically sealed contacts eventually oxidizes, pits, arcs, or melts. My maintenance free battery is really a throw away battery. I've had some experience working on process controllers for the food canning business. It's amazing how much rotting muck can find it's way into sealed NEMA enclosures. I don't think it's possible to make an autonomous anything that will work even 50 years, much less 1000.

Actually, the biggest problem are the human operators. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactor meltdowns comes to mind, where the humans involved made things worse by their attempts to fix things. Yeah, maybe autonomous would better than human maintained.

I once worked on a cost plus project, which is essentially an unlimited cost system. They pulled the plug before we even got started because we had exceeded some unstated limit. There's no such thing as "cost is no object".

Repair how and using what materials? Like I said before, do you have a CK722 transistor handy to fix my ancient 6 transistor AM portable antique radio? I was lucky and found one that was made in the early

1960's. Ok, that's about 50 years. In another 50 years, such replacement devices will only be found in museums and landfills. You could make a plug-in work-alike replacement using Si-Ge technology. However, that would require that you upgrade (evolve) your spare semiconductor fab production line to switch from your original technology, to the latest technology, which didn't exist when the original was made. Or, you could keep cranking out Ge replacement parts, until your supply of Ge runs out.

You gave the example of the termite and the alligator. I provided links which demonstrate that both have evolved and changed over the millennium, not 1000 year. Many species, including man, have not evolved much in 1000 years. However, for every one that hasn't evolved, there are literally thousands of insects, bacteria, fish, birds, and other species that have changed. The list of extinct and endangered species should offer a clue as to how it works.

If it were that reliable, we wouldn't need ECC (error correcting) memory. Dynamic RAM and hard disk drive densities are down to the point where the electronics has to literally make a guess as to whether it's reading a zero or a one. ECC is a big help, but all too often, the device guesses wrong. Even cosmic rays and local radioactive sources can cause soft errors.

I see these all too often in a rather weird way. When one of my servers experiences an AC power line glitch, it often flips a bit. The bit is usually not being used by the OS or by an application. Several days later, the machine crashes, without any warning or apparent cause, when it needs to read this bit, and finds it in an unexpected state. I've also run memory error tests continuously for several days on various machines (using MemTest86 and MemTest86+) and found random errors ever few days.

You can probably build something that is reliable and stable, but it will involve low density, considerable redundancy, and plenty of error checking and error correction.

Example please? 1000 years ago, we were in the tail end of the dark ages.

If the satellite business had a good financial reason for the birds to last longer, I'm sure they would have done it. Right now, the lifetime of LEO and MEO birds are fairly well matched to their orbital decay life. A 1000 year lifetime on the electronics, won't make much sense if the bird falls out of the sky at 20-30 years. There are numerous orbital decay calculators online.

Name another approach that isn't a circular definition, such as "making it more reliable". What design philosophy should be followed in order to produce a 1000 year design that does NOT evolve in some way?

Ok, lets see if that works. The typical small signal transistor has an MTBF of 300,000 to 600,000 hrs or 34 to 72 years. I'll call it 50 year so I can do the math without finding my calculator. MTBF (mean time between failures) does not predict the life of the device, but merely predicts the interval at which failures might be expected. So, for the 1000 year life of this device, a single common signal transistor would be expected to blow up 200 times. Assuming the robot has about 1000 such transistors, you would need 200,000 spares to make this work. You can increase the MTBF using design methods common in satellite work, but at best, you might be able to increase it to a few million hours.

Great. You're going to seal an engineer inside the machine?

You mean like the cloud storage servers that are erratically having problems? Please provide a single server farm or data dumpster that operated on a sealed building basis. The larger systems take storage reliability quite seriously. For example, Google's disk drive failure analysis:

Geosynchronous satellites are unlikely to suffer from serious orbital decay. However, they have been known to drift out of their assigned orbital slot due to various failures. Unlike LEO and MEO, their useful life is not dictated by orbital decay. So, why are they not designed to last more than about 30 years?

Please provide a few examples of devices that were INTENTIONALLY designed to last more than 1000 years. The 10,000 year clock is a good example. Got any more?

The methods that are used for satellite life extension (reloadable firmware) are directly relevant to doing the same on the ground in a sealed environment.

At the risk of being repetitive, the reason that one needs to improve firmware over a 1000 year time span is to allow it to adapt to unpredictable and changing conditions.

True. However, not providing a means of improving or adapting the system to changing conditions will relegate this machine to the junk yard in a fairly short time. All it takes is one hiccup or environmental "leak", that wasn't considered by the designers, and it's dead. Stupid machines don't last and brute force is not a long term survival trait. Ask the dinosaurs.

Various countries are doing a great job of making rare minerals both difficult to obtain and expensive for political and financial reasons. A commodity doesn't need to be scarce in order to be difficult to obtain.

Example please.

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I said: "Price is not a big issue, if necessary." I know it's gonna be expensive and we certainly need custom designed parts, but a whole semiconductor fab and developing radically new semiconductors are probably beyond our limits.

Have the robots fetch a spare part from the storage and replace it. Circuit boards, CPUs, connectors, cameras, motors, gears, galvanic cells/membranes of the vanadium redox flow batteries, thermo couples, etc. They need to be designed and arranged so the robots can replace them.

It's quite common that normal computer parts work 10 years. High reliability parts probably last 50 years. Keep 100 spare parts of each and they last 1000 years, if they don't deteriorate in storage.

Also robots are usually idle and only active when there's something to replace. The power supply, LN2 generator and sensors are more active.

I wonder how reliable rails or overhead cranes that carry robots and parts around are. If replacing rails or overhead crane beams is necessary and unfeasible, the robots will probably drive with wheels.

Because we evolve. We update TV systems, switch from analog to digital etc. My cryo store just needs to the same thing for a long time.

Initially there will be humans verifying how the cryo store does and improve soft/firmware and probably some hardware, too, but there may well be a point where they are no longer available. Then it shall continue autonomously.

Yes. We need to consider very thoroughly every failure mode. And when something unexpected happens, the cryo facility will call for help via radio/internet. I even thought of serving live video of the facility so it remains popular and people might call the cops if someone tries to harm it. Volunteers could fix bugs or implement hard/software for not considered failure modes.

so you're prepared to take the performance hit and use thermionics instead? it's not like they're going to work after 1000 years either (unless perhaps stored in a vacuum.) but the fab is simpler.

where are you going to get a cpu in 700 years time? the ones in the store will be have diffused away.

the problem is that they do... keeping them on ice (or in liquid helium) might help enough

build them from stainless steel and the tracks thick enough to withstand 1000 years traffic, perhaps have a few spare cranes parked at the end of the track.

So in 1000 years the robots have sold their charges on ebay and are playing online poker to buy electricity.

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Did you see the pictures of the Fukushima reactor control room ?

So 1970's :-)

But generally, also in many other heavy industry sectors with the actual industrial hardware being used for 50-200 years, you might still keep over 30 years old sensors, actuators, field cables and I/O cards, while upgrading higher level functions, such as control rooms, to modern technology.

The geostationary satellite lifetime is limited by the amount of station keeping fuel on board. The earth is not a perfect sphere and hence, sooner or later, the satellite would be moving in a figure of eight, as seen from earth.

If the figure is larger than the ground antenna beam width, active satellite tracking is needed, which would be unacceptable for at least home receiver antennas. For these reasons, the satellite position has to be maintained within a degree or two in both E/W as well as N/S direction, which requires station keeping fuel, ultimately determining the usable life time of a geostationary satellite.

Since satellite transponders are simple "bent tubes", switching from analog (FM) to DVB-S might have required some backoff in the TWT. Going from DVB-S to DVB-S2 might require some further backoff, This of course drops out some of the smallest receiving antennas.

The ana/digi switchover might require some higher power TWTs and/or narrower satellite beams, otherwise the A/D change is not that dramatic.