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Comment by simlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Cheapest ? No. Most effective ? No. Most persistent ? No.

They compare with disks but don't compare it with other materials such as marble.

Marble is too soft. Granite is better. I've made arrangements for my most important personal data (full name, birth and death dates) to be engraved on a granite slab when I die. This slab will be physically arranged alongside others, one for each family member, showing the relationships among people. This will be set up in a special location set aside for that purpose, outdoors safe from fire and building collapse. I expect the data to still be readable hundreds of years from now.

I can imagine that, in the near future, there will be headstones in cemeteries, with nothing on them except a QR code, which will require an app to scan, and a key to decrypt the data.

I wonder what future civilisations - where smartphones and encryption algorithms have been long lost - will make of that?

And we thought the Egyptians left us a tough one to crack!

There are occasional headstones with recipes on them. I love to imagine those aliens trying to figure out Aunt Naomi’s Spritz Cookies.

Until the property gets developed a couple decades later and they "move it".

Egyptian pharaohs knew a solution to that problem.

It seems the larger the size of your grave, the better it gets preserved. :)

I wonder if Jezz Bezos will have build something that's even bigger than a pyramid or the Taj Mahal. Maybe he'll buy half the moon or something.

Bring a bouldozer, load everything on a dump track and dump it in a nearby forest.

are those things your most important personal data? if i cared this much i’d probably prefer to leave a sentence or two rather than my proper name…

Marble reacts with almost anything, gold and nickel is the last thing to react. Elementary school chemistry: Gold is the least reactive metal

> Elementary school chemistry: Gold is the least reactive metal

Yet another case of elementry school chemistry over-simplifying and getting things wrong. Silver and platinum compete with gold, even if you stay within the realm of elementary school definitions of metal.

Let me guess, you don't own any silverware?

I have both goldware and silverware. But that's pretty much irrelevant, as they're alloys. Platinum is the least reactive of the things people recognise as metals.

You're right that silverware will tarnish much more quickly because of the addition of copper (and possibly other metals) -- so a bad example from me. But whilst pure silver is much more resilient to tarnishing, it will still slowly tarnish because even normal indoor air is prone to contain trace amounts of gasses with sulfur like hydrogen sulfide, which will react with the silver. Whereas I don't think pure gold does.

My guess would also be that most people who had school chemistry would order the silver, gold and platinum correctly in terms of their relative reactivity (and value) because this replicates exactly the order of fanciness of credit cards, record sales etc.

This. And I always laugh when people say gold has no value. It’s literally the best metal known to mankind. The reason why it’s not used much is because of its price.

There’s a lesson here in what “value” means.

But - try to handle some fine gold one day. It is lustrous, but also incredibly easy to dent - drop it and it’ll scratch like a 2010s-era phone. It is easy to work, but won’t hold its shape. If we had oceans of the stuff, we still wouldn’t use it to make a car or a laptop or a pistol or a building, it would take the place of lead in things like counterweights and radiation shielding, maybe home insulation or cooking foil, places where its softness and density aren't too much of a drawback but the low reactivity is beneficial.

Yes, of course, it’s not for all cases. One interesting thing though with gold is that it can be melted and reworked basically forever. This means that if you own gold today, your great-great-great-grandchildren could still be using it in 1000 years. This is not true of most materials. Gold’s value is basically the present value of all future uses.

> It’s literally the best metal

For some particular values of "best".

As gold is rather malleable (soft), these plates would probably scratch easily.

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