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Comment by debdut | Hacker News Reader

It’s not about efficiency, think how many years a hard drive will last? 3 years. How many years a gold plate will last? thousands of years. Least reactive metal not for a reason lol

Plus if there is a ion blast from a nearby supernova, it’ll erase all electronic storage devices on earth

https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8

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> How many years a gold plate will last?

A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.

It isn't a gold plate. It advertises itself as solid gold. It is in fact solid nickel, with 200-400 mg of gold peppered in. It's also at most 6.4 x 12.8 cm plate, which is tiny. If it were solid gold at 19.3 g/cm^3, it would have a thickness of 2.6 µm which is thin compared to your approx. 50 µm human hair. It is not, and therefore it is not solid gold.

If there is an ion blast sufficient to wipe all electronic storage devices on earth, won't the associated radiation also be fatal to a large percentage of the population?

No. People are more resilient than electronic storage media.

even if not, if all the electronics suddenly stopped a sizeable chunk of the population will die immediately or in a bit… i wonder how many safety protocols for objects with huge blast radius are dependent on electronics running continuously

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