OT very long term data storage

What is interesting is that it presents the deliverable basically as a decoration. I would think the real value (investment payoff) of reliable long term storage is with banks, military, and government. Maybe the technology doesn't scale. I don't know.

I see several problems with their sales pitch:

1. Most people have no interest in storage beyond their deaths.
2. The product is not immune to obsolete reader technologies.
3. Nothing is unalterable. They can alter it so other things can alter it.

JJS

Uh, when do you expect microscopes will become obsolete?

My vote is for paper tape using acid free paper, lol

Think huge amounts of numeric and text data, not pictorial data. You can't reconstruct that kind of data visually.

JJS

You can scan it, with your eye or with a tool.

Yes, I think the whole point of really long term data storage is to make it as universally readable as possible, never mind the amount of effort this takes - just make it possible. If the giant frogs inhabiting the planet a few (thousands of?) millennia from now cannot figure it out then it is their problem. Perhaps the supersnails after them will manage it, whoever.

Commercially I am not sure this can be made successful but I guess the knowledge humanity has gathered is worth saving on something really robust.

If it lives up to their promise, that is. From what we know paper (may be exactly as Rick suggested, punched acid free...) is perhaps still our best bet, let us hope these guys manage to beat that. Then the frogs would be in real trouble deciphering ASCII tapes (but should be possible, many years ago I deciphered the excellon drill format by looking at a punched tape I had access to - and these frogs are supposed to be much smarter than me :-) ).

Dimiter

Paper tape is nice, since you do need any special reader. In the 7 bit ASCII days I was quite proficient reading texts from paper tapes, Latin1 or UTF-8 would of course be much harder.

Tonsured monks seem to have done very well at this in the past. And, without any "special technology".

You mean by a human, right? Since when are microscopes limited to humans?

That sounds like a pretty big assumption to me! I wonder if maybe the giant frogs really could master the technology to read the sapphire, but just don't care about the human "knowledge" that destroyed the earth's ecosystem. (picture the torch of the statue of liberty rising from the waters)

Hmmmm... I can't hold back... yet another assumption, but likely valid. Oh, you mean the frogs of the future...

The library of congress has done a lot of work in the area of long-term data storage.

Do they have many frogs working there? Ribbit!

Well giant frogs deserve big assumptions, dont't they :D. I don't think we can destroy life, we don't have what it takes. We might be able to destroy the ecosystem and ourselves as you suggest but life would keep on evolving I guess (enter the Frogs :-). Then we may find a way, not all societies on Earth grow their population beyond control so it seems doable (well, perhaps doable).

Will the giant frogs/snails whatever the species whose archaeologists find our data be interested.... I would suppose so, all creatures we know seem to be curious. Look at how humans read tons of bollocks in ancient findings trying to discover some universal truth, God, aliens, you name it - in the scribbles of cave men :D.

Dimiter

So the frogs of the future are taken good care of then :D.

On a more serious note, it is astonishing how one feels good knowing that someone has done the job of long term knowledge preservation. It is none of our direct concern, humans do not live long term - yet we appear to be programmed to put a very high priority on long term data preservation (and thus ensuring the species will preserve whatever evolutionary advantages knowledge has bought it and perhaps move ahead).

Dimiter

I don't think the the frogs will be too interested... I picture the following:

The archive vault broken open, giant sentient frogs searching through the saphhire disks, glancing at the disks one at a time then throwing each one over their shoulder with the remark: "reddit, reddit, reddit..."

The frogs there say "read-it".

The thing we need to measure is the cost of retrieval.

Archaeology is the science of retrieving data that was not written down. We can dig up a skull and discern that this person was killed with an axe, but it's very expensive to do that. We wouldn't dig them up if we had the coroner's report (unless we doubted it) because it's much cheaper to read the report than dig up the body. We're very selective of what data we choose to retrieving using archaeology, because it's very expensive.

So, assuming there is some information content still there, anything can be retrieved by spending enough money. Then the questions are:

a) how much data can we store, for what cost? b) at date X in the future, how much will it cost per byte to read? c) how is that cost likely to change as time goes on? (ie what does the cost/time graph look like) d) what data rate can we get, and can we increase the data rate by spending more (the data rate/cost graph)

Data which can't be retrieved for an economically affordable cost (which will vary depending on the meaning of the information encoded and the date of retrieval) might was well not have been stored.

Theo

Which, ultimately, is related to the VALUE of that which is retrieved! While *some* may wish to understand the cultural issues, religious beliefs, etc. of an "ancient/past civilization" (i.e. US, when viewed from the future), retrieving data on the earth-centric model of the solar system is probably not worth much -- in practical terms -- to a civilization that has moved beyond that!

Similarly, "bad" knowledge has much less value than that which is "better". How much would we value details of blood-letting procedures practiced in early medicine? Contrast that with knowing how to preserve meats and produce in pre-refrigeration days!

Likewise for material that has no (little) *genuine* value ("The Heavens revolve around the Earth, in all it's majesty! And, by the way, to compensate for the discrepancies between this model and OBSERVATIONS, here are some elaborate *tweeks* that defy logic in a mechanical universe...")

In the old days, when making a copy of a work was very costly and thus only a single copy might be stored in some central location, a single event, such as the fire(s) of library of Alexandria might have destroyed the only copy.

These days, when making a copy costs practically nothing and the information can be stored at multiple places, the loss of a single copy is not that big issue.

The problem today is that the medium lifetime is so limited. Modern paper self destructs in a century or two, reading various magnetic media and formats becomes difficult after a decade or two, so you need some organized society at least somewhere in the word every decade for making copies to more modern media and formats.

How many folks can still read 5.25" floppies? What about 8"? Hard sectored? PPT? 9T tape? And, we'll forget things like ORB's, Bernoulli, WORM, etc.

"Tonsured monks"

I see the problem as deciding *what* to preserve. Put your eggs in one basket -- then "watch that basket!"