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> During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge.

And during no particular war at all, the local government may decide to demolish artifacts and sites for political reasons. For example, China and Tibetan statues and temples. I'm not sure the original locations are very safe either.

Edit: I was actually incorrectly remembering Chinese mining destruction in Afghanistan.[1] I'm not aware of a direct attack on Tibetan artifacts by China beyond their actions to repress the religion in general.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho...

regarding Tibetan artifacts and buildings. any pointers? I can't believe that statement in general. (if you would have mentioned the Taliban in Afghanistan on the other hand ...)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Tibetan+demolition

I was actually thinking of Chinese mining in Afghanistan[1], but couldn't remember all the context. In searching before posting to make sure I wasn't incorrect, I did run across reports of China destroying Tibetan monasteries.[2][3] That said, from looking a bit closer at the articles now, it looks more like China's continued attack on the religion, and not the artifacts themselves, since it's targeting homes next to a monastery (which happen to house people who work at the monastery, if the reporting is to be interpreted correctly, which isn't easy on this topic because it appears reporters are trying to strongly imply something without saying it, which is a red flag).

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho...

2: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36863888

3: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/world/asia/china-tibet-la...

Current archeologists only excavate sites 'at risk' e.g. new building development or looting. In all other cases, they strive to do non-intrusive exploration e.g. ground penetrating radar and lidar.

Why isnt radar used for pyramid? If we have ground-penetrating radar it should work for pyramids, no?

It is. Particularly for finding tunnels and chambers near the surface.

It usually doesn't go very deep, especially in dry rock.

> Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?

That's not really an archaeologist problem. But there are a few projects to do things like print off wikipedia on low acid paper and store it in vaults.

Also the memory of mankind project is storing ceramic tablets in a salt mine.

https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledg...

Einstein said "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

I don't think archeology will be of much concern after WWIII.

This. And we don't even need WW3. Consider the amount of desertification, greenhouse gases, and reduction of biodiversity and extrapolate.

Well, not immediately after WWIII. But, possibly, eventually after sufficient millennia have passed.

The Internet Archive has that goal (archive.org), it’s paid for by Brewster Kahle personally.

> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct

I hope they're recording all of the data on stone tablets in cuneiform, instead of in some digital format for which reading hardware will be obsolete in a few years... ;-)

I remember reading about this a while back (probably on HN). They're storing a bunch of data along with the OSs and devices to read it in a bunker in Switzerland, so if we do leave a bunch of digital data, future generations can actually access it. Tried to find a decent article, but this was about the best I could do: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp

"They" in that case aren't the "Internet Archive" but the European research projects about the digital preservation.

The Internet Archive collects the donations now for the Canada site:

"this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because lots of copies keeps stuff safe. We estimate this will cost $5 million. With your support, we are more than halfway there."

https://archive.org/donate/

How long does a turned off device stay operational? (main circuitry itself, screen, battery, storage -- whatever the devices they're using have) Also, we were able to decipher cuneiform because there were a lot of clay tablets available to study, but will people in, say, 2k to 4k years from now be able to decipher how to work the devices, its OS and access the library of data? Even my iPhone requires a surprisingly large amount of knowledge to access my various bits of data, if it were 4,000 years in the future and nobody understands English anymore, I can imagine it would be difficult to decipher. Perhaps we should be leaving a load of stone carvings somehow explaining how to operate the devices (and to read english, or whatever language)

From the linked article:

> "If we can nail the next 100 years, we figure we will be able to nail the next 100 years as well," Farquhar said.

Except.. if there is a massive disaster event of sorts (WW3 was mentioned in the comments here), it may be longer than 100 years before somebody is in a position to access this archive. It may then be too late. Or the country is in crisis and the facility gets decommissioned or abandoned.

I'm not saying they're not doing a great thing -- they are! I'm just concerned that it relies on a bit of luck.

They have 15 petabytes of data, and they keep distributed backups. They also accept donations and volunteers, so if you have better suggestions I'm sure you can go yourself and help

> the Archive attempts to create copies of (parts of) the collection at more distant locations, currently including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina[10] in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.[11] The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium[12] and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007.[13]

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive

The Internet Archive accepts donations too!

https://archive.org/donate/

(Disclaimer: not working there, just a happy supporter.)

On a similar note, look at what happened in Iraq during the ISIS rein. Thousands of ancient monuments were destroyed :(

With launch costs coming down it'll soon be more practical to launch a satellite into orbit that can store this information for a long time.

Never to be found again

Orbits decay, often at a plannable rate. Eventually it crashes back to earth and becomes an archeological relic for future explorers. I bet you could even design the sattelite to burn specatularly (in many colors) on the way down so it's more likely to be seen and sought after.

Though, it would most likely end up in the ocean since the majority of the earth's surface is covered by water.

Just put enough satellites so it's statically very likely that one will land on land. (Although I don't see the point of this project)

Orbits only really decay due to atmospheric drag. Other tiny bits of cosmic, rarified gas can slow the spacecraft on a long timescale, and solar radiation pressure can perturb an orbit (occasionally dramatically, if the Sun is unhappy), but the effect is far smaller than constant drag. If a small satellite is orbiting Earth at a high enough altitude which was calculated to consider the broader gravitational system (Earth's natural satellites, the Sun, and fainter perturbations from nearby celestial objects have to be factored in), orbit can be designed to be stable on a long, long timescale. Millions of years, or more.

The real fly in your plan's ointment would be exposure to space, which sucks a lot for electronics.

I don't think that's a, uh, "fly in my plan's ointment". I don't think the satellite needs electronics at all.

Those are called ballistic projectiles, and you cannot place one in a precise orbit. You need upper-stage guidance, admittedly just for the placement of the satellite, but you still need electronics. Though, that being said, I'm now curious how you intend to store large-scale data without any use of electronics.

Let me clarify - you don't need electronics that are effective forever. You would store the data in an analog format.

I'm struggling to think of a suitable "analog format," maybe help me out? Silicon tablets of runes? Analog is unscalable here, no matter how cheap launch systems are.

Probably something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

Stuff in the middle of a lot of not-stuff is fairly findable.

Particularly if it has a strong signature on radar or microwave imaging.

I was thinking in the case the civilization lost access to a lot of basic data. Then finding the magic satellite without magic radar, maybe without even knowing about the magic satellite amongst all the other satellites up there.

A billion years is a long time.

That said, a few redundant copies elsewhere wouldn't hurt.

Oh, no I love the idea of a time capsule in space. In fact, given how cheap some mylar (for detection) and silicon (for inscribing information) is, I think "we" (humanity) should put a bunch of it up there. Like they Voyager probes, but MUCH more data, and maybe in orbit around the sun. But it's not something to rely upon as backups - but very nice as a message into curious explorers of the future.

A deep cave structure on the moon, and large triangles formed into the lunarscape visible from telescope on earth pointing towards the entrance. Bonus: You'll probably spur space development technology faster than normal for any civilization that can see it.

Bury a bunch of magnets ....

Depends on your definition of 'findable', I suppose.

Flight 370 wasn't found after "the most expensive search operation in aviation history[1]" performed by a multinational effort over almost three years. There are distinctions to quibble about, sure, and there are things that could be done to make things not designed to shuttle meatbags around easier to find.

But the area comprising the middle of the not-stuff you reference is big.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#S...

> There are distinctions to quibble about, sure

That's an example of stuff in the middle of a whole bunch of other stuff, not in the middle of a bunch of non-stuff. I'm not sure that it's all that similar at all, beyond as a a very general "finding stuff can be hard" example.

Oh, I may have become confused as to which part of this thread I was responding to - I thought we were talking about finding a satellite after reentry.

Oh, I imagine unplanned and reentry would likely make it very hard to locate, if not destroy the contents in the process. Decaying orbits would mean it's likely to happen, too. But I think if a civilization has the capability to reach an orbit, it's likely they have the technology to find something in orbit, or will shortly.

A better plan might be to create a structure on the moon to house it, and create giant triangles in the landscape of the moon visible through telescope that point towards it. The moon is fairly stable to my knowledge (except for meteorites, but I think that can be somewhat mitigated depending on the time frame we are talking about), and people always like looking at the moon through telescopes...

And we should make it black and rectangular shape. I suggest we call it the monolith. We might want to put a few of them around the solar system just to be safe.

Sounds like it's a safer option, but requires that you have the technology and energy sources to communicate with that satellite - which is not really 100% reliable if you are about to experience a planet-wide catastrophe of such magnitude that it would require storing data outside of the Earth surface in a first place.

You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.

> You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future.

it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done.

> Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.

chunks of satellites are far more likely to survive reentry already than you might expect. i expect it would be feasible now to produce an insert sphere filled with information etched on nickel-superalloy plates that would survive uncontrolled reentry and impact with the earth's surface.

i'd suggest storing the information in something covered with retro-reflectors, and dropping it onto the moon's surface, though. need more delta-V to get it there and retrieve it, but it'd be a simpler object to construct, and then later deconstruct.

>it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done.

Well, you could schedule a deorbit burn, assuming the hardware is still in working order far into the future.

You can calculate an estimate of reentry from atmospheric drag. It's not going to be exact but anything you throw up into LEO is going to come down someday and as long as the atmosphere doesn't change too much, it should be fairly close.

http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/Space%20Weath...

You can't do this on a long term scale with something that's below geostationary orbit, because random solar flares and solar phenomena cause expansion and contraction of the earth's atmosphere at unpredictable times. If you have a satellite in an orbit that is low enough to gradually degrade through atmospheric drag (even if it's a very high-LEO orbit or molniya orbit that won't reenter for an estimated 300 years), the exact time that it will re-enter can't be predicted with any confidence. At least not if you are talking about a very long time scale. Short-term (3, 5 or 7 year time scale) orbit degradation of things in LEO is predictable based on orbital height and known atmospheric density at a given altitude, but beyond that any re-entry predictions become much more fuzzy.

for reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0233

If you want to put something in orbit that will stay in a predictable location, you don't want it to re-enter at all, you want to put it in an orbit that is high enough to not be affected by atmospheric drag on a geologic time scale. Something slightly beyond geostationary will still be there in 200,000 years.

>Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?

That's an interesting project on it's own (and there are various types of "capsules" -- from knowledge to seeds) but it's not particularly relevant to archeology.

Archeological info to be retained is just an small subset of knowledge to be retained in general (e.g. scientific, technological, state records, cultural (music, literature, movies), software, historical, etc).

I think the http://longnow.org/ foundation has a few related projects

Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain.

Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon landings, and much of the knowledge of how the software written back then will die out when the engineers who worked on them do, because software knowledge isn't passed on generationally the way culture and language are.

It's likely that archaeologists from the year 4017 will be picking through our garbage, rather than our software, and that their ability to accomplish the latter will depend entirely on whether they find a "Rosetta Stone" in the former that lets them reconstruct everything from first principles.

For the most part you want to remove access to these artifacts from "graverobbers" who could not care any less about historical or any other value than how much they can get --which is often peanuts compared to their historical value, or what is paid by collectors.

Somewhere, someone has thrown away a copy of Javascript the good parts, that will be humanity's saving grace.

> Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations.

I've been on a bit of a wikipedia binge recently: Its actually even older than that. Babylonia was the Akkadian country that used cuneiform, but Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets exist that are much older still!

Related (Although it is a project to preserve a record of the world's languages and not archaeological knowledge) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages."

save them from isis and rebels ? Better in museums than on ebay.

Seems to me that stuff sitting in museums is more vulnerable to such bad actors than stuff sitting under a meter of dirt.

Unless ISS loots the museums, which is also in their playbook.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/the-2003-looti...

> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage

...but that's museums books, which you just criticised.

why not make long term digital storage for things like this? I would donate for a project like this.