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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

So I'd like this on medium that's a bit more permanent than paper, but with similar information density per kg, and similar re-creatability without having any of the original tools available. I'd like to store data for say 100 thousand years.

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When I was in college I worked in a lab making tiny circuits used for testing a nanorotor they were working on.

First we would put a small piece of glass in a sputter deposition machine, which would deposit a thin film of gold on the surface. Then in a clean room, the gold film would be covered by a photoresistive chemical and placed in a machine similar to an enlarger in a darkroom, except it would shrink the image instead of enlarging. An A4 sized transparency containing the circuit design would be placed in the machine, which was optically shrunk to the (~2cm x 2cm) size of the glass and exposed with UV light. Finally, it was processed with chemicals to etch away the exposed gold, leaving the gold microcircuit traces.

I'm certain you could use this process to encode data with a scheme like PaperBack, and if you could find a substrate lighter than glass that both resisted delamination and could survive the etching chemical bath, the gold film could probably last for 100k+ years.

Etching the data into silicon wafers has been done before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeny_Ted_from_Turnip_Town

It does require quite a bit more equipment to read back, however.

One nice thing about the gold-on-glass idea is that it can be read with a simple slide projector or similar. It's small but not ridiculously so.

Gold itself may not be a very good medium for storage, because in the meantime (e.g. some intermittent dark ages) someone may decide that the gold is worth more than the bits they encode, and scrape them off.

The Church of Scientology is transcribing L. Ron Hubbard's writing onto stainless steel plates, encased in titanium capsules and buried in the desert[0]. So in the event of a global apocalypse any future survivors or aliens may think that Dianetics was the pinnacle of our culture!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base

You'll want something that an unsophisticated civilization can make copies of. Might be interesting to have a stylized form of a modern language with layout that incorporates simple integrity checks. The monks who copied documents in the middle ages made a lot of errors.

The Jewish scribes who copied the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible did use a system of integrity checks, in a traditional apparatus called the 'Masorah parva'. It wasn't perfect, and didn't have checks throughout, but as a computer scientist, I was fascinated to see how they'd dipped their toes into the idea.

I wonder if there are other texts that were copied by hand that had similar approaches. The Qur'an, perhaps?

You could laser burn it onto the rubber material stamps are made of. That would allow for easily making copies on paper.

Not sure whether "stamp" is the right word. I'm talking about this: http://www.stempel-wolf.de/de/img/stempel/herstellung/gravur...

Clay tablets? They survived from Sumer, Assyria and Babylon thousands of years ago.

True, some of them did. Any idea what fraction survived?

I quite like the idea of being able to frame the backup an important piece of text and put it on my wall.

A significant number. The British Museum alone has 30,943 tablets. The study of Mesopotamia is relatively new and as far as I know not all of the tablets were translated.

Archiving data to 35mm motion picture film has been done, including putting the source code to the decoding software on the leader of the film.

Re: http://group47.com/what-is-dots/

This is both a great summary pitch and intriguing storage system!

I found it interesting. Thanks.

I'm not sure how long it would last but how about something like a bubblegram [1] (laser crystal)... You could use a flatter plastic block and create a 2D image inside. Also, maybe other materials can be used.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram

Concrete? Perhaps a 3D printer could make a mold from a data format similar to this one, even one in 3D..

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-3D-Print-Molds-for-Sm...

How would you read it back?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_braille_recognition

* http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html

* 3D Scanning At Home! (Using an xbox Kinect) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKb3oEM47E

... If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much could we encode in a statue?

Plastic may already be sufficiently inert. Maybe compose/print sheets of plastic using two kinds of plastics, which will always have different colors.

Tyvek, perhaps? I'm not sure how long-term it would stick around, but it wouldn't decay as fast as paper in an unprotected environment.

You beat me to it. Tyvek would be an excellent candidate for its amazing durability and that it behaves much like paper (at least in terms of texture).

An IBM researcher did this with a Tyvek-like material in the 90s, a polyester made by DuPond if I remember correctly. Just tried to google a reference but no luck.

Tyvek is basically HDPE plastic, and relative to paper it has much poorer temperature resistance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-density_polyethylene

Not 100,000 years, but if you're looking for something that will last longer than paper, I recommend... paper. Rag paper. 100% rag, acid free copier/laser paper should be available at most office supply stores.

I'd be more worried about toner de-lamination than paper deterioration in that case.

Paper's pretty good. Not sure it's 100K years good, but you're definitely better with paper than almost anything else in the modern world. People underestimate paper.

It's vulnerable to moisture, mold and insects, though.

If you can solve problems with breakage, very little is going to compete with glass or ceramic. So, something it's hard to apply breaking force to: Maybe etch glass balls, add some impurities for visibility, then re-coat with more glass for protection. A handful of beads will survive nearly anything.

In a glass bead you could set up with the data and like a lens, i.e. the data is small and when you shine light through it it projects the information at a wall. On the other hand spheres may have the problem that they roll away; and you always need another medium (like a box) to keep them together.

How about 2,000 ~ 10,000 years? http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/

A company called Norsam (norsam.com) can engrave text on a 5" nickel or gold disk using ion deposition. They get 20,000 pages per disk. Nickel will not corrode. All any future civilization would need to read it back is a microscope and OCR.

DNA? You didn't mention price :)

See the front page right now [1]. Price of DNA is currently dropping!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246514

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