The largest preservation effort along these lines—though not using ceramics—is probably the Internet Archive, which seals physcial materials into shipping containers. Some examples:
This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially) or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the hair of mummies for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy
> In 1974 Egyptologists visiting his tomb noticed that the mummy's condition was rapidly deteriorating and flew it to Paris for examination. Ramesses II was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as "King (deceased)".
Humanity is simply amazing... we have come so far. A king who died ~3500 years ago was flown thousands of kilometers on a plane and was issued his own passport!
> bury them in the North African desert
How viable do you think would it be to setup a business that provides storage space and tracking capability in the Tunisian desert? I'm from Tunisia btw, and I think government seed funds would be happy to fund something like that. The biggest issue is who would actually pay for a service like that?
One big question in the minds of many customers might be political stability. Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct? Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two world wars.
There's definitely a commericial market for storing paper documents for decades, maybe up to a century. This is currently addressed by existing mine-based storage companies, among other things. Plus mines are secure: There's often only one way in and the storage is surrounded by rock.
Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something.
> One big question in the minds of many customers might be political stability. Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct?
Correct, but the transition was from an autocracy to a fledgling democracy; the opposite would be more concerning. Security and infrastructure are both improving. Foreign investments are on the rise.
This is the absolute best time to be setting up a foreign business in Tunisia, since the government will basically pay you money to do so. Oh, and skilled labor is extremely cheap and the currency is at a low right now. The only issue is that English is a 3rd language - French is more common - but Tunisians are starting to adopt English more as it opens more doors, especially on the internet.
> Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two world wars.
Great, but the labor costs and bureaucratic overhead alone would be prohibitively high - 500 years of stability doesn't come for free! Another issue for such a business specifically is that Switzerland is landlocked. Tunisia's access to the sea is excellent, and it has a number of ports spread from north to south (the beaches are amazing btw!). Tunisia is also very close to Europe, and is the northernmost country in Africa.
The advantage Tunisia has over its North African neighbors (Morocco, Algeria, and Libya) is that sea access is better, and getting to the desert is easier as Tunisia is smaller in size.
Yes, and I'm still not over that to be honest. We were in it together, but foreign interests didn't seem to align with the will of the Egyptian people.
Egypt is a regional power, so they wouldn't let it off as easily. Plus, I recall that Morsi made some questionable decisions throughout his (short) term as president.
> Correct, but the transition was from an autocracy to a fledgling democracy; the opposite would be more concerning. Security and infrastructure are both improving. Foreign investments are on the rise.
The issue is less "how's it going right now" and more "how will it be in a few centuries".
I can name several empires and/or civilizations that were stable for much longer than Switzerland has. The ones that remain are now essentially third-world countries.
The current world super power was colonized by a foreign force just 300 years back. That same occupying force can now be crushed by said super power.
The two great powers of the 15th century are now each facing a severe economic crisis.
The past is not a reliable indicator of the future.
"Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something."
I'm of the mind that burying such records in a highly-conspicuous site on the Moon might be a better solution. Much less risk to geological processes or tomb raiders; if you can get that far from Earth then you might be responsible enough to deal with the archive.
Oh, I concede that there is no guarantee that an organization or country advanced enough to launch a mission to the Moon would be responsible custodians of the information (alternate timelines where Germany or the Soviet Union land men on the Moon come to mind). But they might be less inclined to destroy it outright instead of seeing what they can use for themselves.
The best we can hope for is to make data available to the future; what they do with it is ultimately out of our hands.
My thought was that if a party can coordinate a flight to the Moon then that party is intelligent enough to recognize and appreciate such an archive...rather than destroy it. As opposed to the likes of the Taliban, who made a point to destroy historical works.
None of this means that multiple, redundant archives cannot be created. I just think that the Moon offers a unique level of protection from those would would destroy or otherwise degrade such a collection.
Who cares about any possible "successors"? I say we should put this archive on the Moon (or better yet, copies on the Moon, Mars, and all the geologically-inactive planets or planetoids in this system), not for us, but for any alien archeologists who happen to make it here, so they can document our existence and use it to learn about the mistakes of a failed civilization. Because if this information is ever needed, we'll probably have wiped ourselves out, and this planet is not a safe place to store such information as it'll either be destroyed by our weapons of mass destruction or by natural forces over time after we're extinct. If we actually do have successors, they'll probably destroy the archive when they get their hands on it, just like the Taliban do to everything historical they find.
Seems a bit puerile, like writing "I was here" on a planet then joy-riding home with a big grin on your face. Humanity just got over doing that on all continents, though it still exists in some small communities (eg. mountain climbers). We have a long way to go.
Leaving a complete historical record for your civilization hardly equates to writing "I was here". I'm sure Wikipedia's diligent workers will be happy to know that all their efforts equate to graffiti in your view.
As a Wikipedia administrator myself, I do believe it's important to take a distant perspective at times. The capacity to laugh at your own efforts and predicament certainly has value. At the time scales of the rise and fall of civilizations, one should not take oneself so seriously!
Some of the oldest libraries in the world were in Timbuktu, in Mali. Much of that material was destroyed during the 2012 civil war in Mali, in which Ansar Dine Islamist forces (aligned with Al Qaeda) smashed everything that did not align with their particular interpretation of Islam.
It's very difficult to design a library that can survive the waves of human political conflict for millennia.
redundancy. i feel like it would be unlikely to have a war that spanned multiple continents. (i know about the world wars , but those didnt affect south america or most of africa and asia.)
of course, you'd have to be ok with photocopies instead of originals. for the purpose of preserving information, i dont see a problem with photocopies.
The war that destroyed historic artifacts in Timbuktu already spans multiple continents. Ansar Dine learned their approach from Saudi clerics who came to Libya via Pakistan. The same movement did the 9/11 attacks in the US. It's a hot war in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and it's terrorism in Europe and the US.
And redundancy? Around 240BC, the first Qin emperor in China had all non-technical books burned. We have much of the oldest Chinese literature because it was restored from memory after his death.
If someone wants to burn it all, and can get enough power, they will find a way.
lol, I was not expecting that comment to generate any controversy. :)
So you feel that even if we had archives buried in bunkers underground, on 6 continents, that somebody could still destroy all of it? I hear what you're saying about if they can get enough power, I just don't see anyone succeeding in taking over the entire world. I guess I'm an optimist :P
> (i know about the world wars , but those didnt affect south america or most of africa and asia
Really? Russia, Japan, the fall of the Ottoman empire, the creation of the state of Israel and its ongoing repercussions, the start of a century of US involvement in South America to protect the Panama Canal and other assets, Mussolini, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco were not enough for you? China lost 14 million people to WWII...
WWII is pretty much singlehandedly responsible as a turning point for the ongoing mess in South America, North Africa, and the Middle East.
my point was that archives in multiple locations would be much more resilient to destruction. Even if there is conflict, no single party could easily destroy the entire library if it was distributed. they might get one or two, but we wouldnt lose access to the libraries contents.
There's definitely a market for it, but the market also tends to be adverse to international shipping. It would also likely view North Africa as a region, not politically stable enough overall (not speaking about Tunisia, just the whole North Africa region in aggregate) to make them comfortable with using such a facility.
I wish more people would donate to them. So many tech billionaires, you'd think at least one of them would be aware and not mind spending what amounts to loose pocket change for them to preserve information.
No, there are many deserts far older than human agriculture. Humans are reponsible for some desertification, but often that's just making existing deserts worse/larger.
> Having endured arid or semi-arid conditions for roughly 55–80 million years, the Namib may be the oldest desert in the world[1][3]
Wow. Just to put that in perspective, it was a desert when North America was still joined to Europe, India wasn't and Australia was an Antarctic appendage:
One source is the satellite radar of the Sahara for instance - all the hidden roads, rivers and towns swallowed by the desert.
Then the American Southwest was grasslands, until gold rush and westward expansion including cattle and sheep, resulting in overgrazing and irreversible changes.
The Gobi was widely inhabited in prehistoric times. People arrived and wham! desert. Its still expanding today, one of the fastest-growing deserts in the world. Because, people.
The Namib is indeed old. Its also almost the smallest desert - #25 on a list of 27 worldwide. So lets grant an exception there.
First of all: correlation != causation. People do live in semi-arid regions bordering on deserts, so if the local climate was even slightly better than it is today people would have lived there and as things changed they would have given up settlements. People living there previously is not proof of them causing desertification.
Also roads going through deserts does not prove much since they could just connect oasis or move goods across the desert without people living within it.
The Sahara itself also is fairly old[0]. Of course its total extent is variable and subject to natural and man-made climate change and other human influence. But there is a huge difference between human activity creating a desert and influencing its extent or aridity.
Most deserts are naturally created through the rain shadow[1] and other precipitation-reducing effects of geographic features.
Regions get less rain because of rain shadow. They can become deserts because of removal of water-conserving ground cover. Its a delicate balance, and wholesale deforestation or grazing can unbalance it with effects lasting for thousands of years.
Besides making the information last 10,000 years, I think another challenge is coming up with a way of indexing that much data so that you can meaningfully search through it without a computer. Something like a combination of a concordance and a card catalog, with some kind of redundancy built. Another interesting thing to ponder is whether you could structure it so there are basic pieces of knowledge, like guidance for developing computing, so they can index the rest of the thing and search it programmatically. I reckon we might be too far removed from our roots to do a good job at that, though...
This guy is on point. This era will be a black hole in history.
I've worked in projects with archivists in a few US government entities --there's hardly anything for more recent administrations. Between easy deletion/loss of data and the difficulty of maintaining access to file formats over time, lots of stuff will vanish.
Clearly we don't capture or archive much of what's produced now, but that's not a new thing. There are very few records of things from more than a couple of hundred years ago. If you want to see anything that isn't the official government's (or monarch's) line there's much, much less.
If you ignore digital media, and compare the number of physical books produced, there are many thousands of times more produced now than there were 500 years ago.
You're right in the sense that a lot will be lost, and that we should strive to do better, but in terms of comparison to the past we're preserving an exceptional amount of knowledge.
What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here.
I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.
That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.
>I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.
That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.
Does humanity care about letting aliens know we once lived here long after we are gone? I doubt it. Without that political will, this expensive space graffiti will never happen.
Does "humanity"? I don't know. There's no way to know that without a poll.
Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've managed to dig up.
Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to destruction of our civilization.
And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".
A black hole relative to when? We're missing the other six parts of the Iliad epic. The play which beat Oedipus Rex at a Grecian theater festival has been lost forever. Incredibly minuscule amounts of recorded history have been preserved until recently.
You can access the public and private papers of most US Presidents, for example. We have letters from US Civil War soldiers and immigrants that are important primary sources.
My wife worked for a municipal water utility which possesses very old (early 19th century) records that shed light into how certain developments in the city's history progressed. Today that equivalent information is all electronic and most will be inaccessible in a decade or less.
Getting insight into how people thought in the past will be harder for this era. Letters are replaced by electronic communication that is difficult to save and store casually. Things like annual reports are electronic only.
Lost Greek works weren't lost because they weren't recorded. They were destroyed by the fall of that civilization and the wars and chaos that followed.
So there won't be any wars or fall of civilizations anymore that could destroy even physical work? We are one crazy world leader from everything being bombed into oblivion. I don't think recording things physically is going to preserve anything in that case.
Not a blackhole compared to the rest of history. If anything, the ~100 years before this 'era' of temporary information that quickly disappears was the exception. We're just slowly reverting to how it was before.
There was a US project in the 1950s, as part of Civil Defense, to put all the information needed to rebuild industrial society on microfiche. Copies, along with microfiche viewers that worked in sunlight, without power, were put in major fallout shelters.
A University I attended had fallout shelters in at least one of its major campus libraries (also a National Archive IIRC). Might not be 'on the shelf' so to speak but I bet they might still have a copy.
I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling information in so it can only be used (ephemerally and in exchange for money) but not usefully retrieved and replicated elsewhere. It's "death by cloud".
The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on being able to make many copies and modifications, too.
People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when clearly the knowledge was almost there. My pet theory about this involves walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be truly accessible to a huge group of people.
Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites. In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their data.
If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your services as possible. Don't just use Spotify, have music on your hard drive. Don't just use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive.
I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life, hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending supervolcano eruption.
Kunze plans to distribute ceramic tokens around the world to everyone who either funds, contributes to, or advises on the project. Every 50 years, starting in 2070, he says, holders will meet to keep the memory of the capsule alive and to discuss if it needs to be reopened
The problem with this is that if there are enough people around that remember about this and have the spare time and means to go there an dig an opening again, then it's probably not needed because society still exists.
If a some global catastrophe happens that wipes out much of our our modern records and knowledge, then "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore.
> "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore.
I think that knowledge would become the new gold/buried treasure in such a world. They who have the knowledge wins, and it will become potentially far more valuable than any stash of Gold.
If that is true for such a post apocalyptic future, then the lore of the buried treasure in the salt mine will probably spread and many will seek it out.
I was mulling on something similar the other day, except I was thinking that it might be sent to a Lagrange point. Might be more stable/less in harms way?
"All of human knowledge"? Let's think about maybe trying to collect that in the first place, before we worry about preservation. A vast amount of essential knowledge is locked away in oral traditions, expensive textbooks, and proprietary company processes. This is why I hate the meme that the the internet gives you access to "all of human knowledge" - it would be unimaginably, profoundly world-changing if it really did.
"Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level."
--yourapostasy [HN user]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828
I wonder if instead we could encode this information in a metal that does not corrode, like gold. Unfortunately gold is also a precious metal. Silver or copper are good candidates too. The transcription of data could be done with a laser in microprint. The data could also be encoded similar to how we encode dvds but instead of just etching a tiny mark a partial hole could be punched half way through for every ON bit. This way the data would be less susceptible to scratches. Make the disc 1 centimeter thick and the holes .5 centimeters deep. This way it would take a lot to destroy the data. A simple scratch would not do it. Anybody with a microscope and the knowledge of binary would be able to decode this. The instructions could be printed on the other side in microprint
That could be read with a microscope.
Books and scientific journals could be the first to be encoded. Reputable newspapers could be next. Maybe the entire library of congress.
Social media data can be encoded dead last or not at all since it would not help in rebuilding a civilization.
We do not need to encode every tweet.
Information is a linear ordering of shifting states. The most information dense substrate I can think of would be irregularities in a (perfect) crystal lattice, plus a convention regarding what path your scanner takes through that lattice.
The problem is that future thinkers need to know it exists, and where to start. Both problems can be solved with a larger, more obvious medium. And in fact, you could have several mediums at different scales between big, billboard sized stuff and the ultimate substrate, and each level describes what you need to do to access the next level down. The billboard(100m) points out the library (1m) describes how to read the microfiche (1mm) describes how to build the TEM (1nm) which you use to read everything else.
Of course, that might very well be far too much information. Certainly most of it will be useless to most observers - just like it is today. Well, we could do worse than just storing Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg, and YouTube. But I digress.
I've been to Hallstatt this summer. If you have time I recommend visiting the place. Next to it there is Königsee which is a UNESCO heritage site. Königsee itself is a tarn and you can literally drink from it. For this reason they only use electric and row boats to traverse the lake. I can't imagine a more suitable location for this burial despite the fact that the place is overlooked by Obersalzberg (Hitler's Eagle Nest).
they'll most likely see us as primitive. but they will be grateful for the pain we endured to let humanity continue to the next evolutionary step. Sort of like how we look at Neanderthals today.
In the excellent fictional work(s) of Humanity Has Declined, a failing and dwindling human race fritters away arguing over how to best implement a Human Monument to all their knowledge and achievements, rather then spending the resources to try to turn around the decline of civilization.
While encoding this onto 1mm ceramic sheets is impressive, if it is to survive a fall of civilization, it needs to be immediately obvious that it has readable and useful text and not depend on a 10x magnifying glass. So they probably ought to be Sumerian tablet-sized.
Solid gold bars. That or top quality stainless steel bars properly passivated and polished. The correct question is what material is near worthless and not usable as a construction brick that is none the less durable and laser engravable. Its going to be hard to beat clay bricks.
This is global doomsday level thinking. Reminds me of Y2K.
And using clay? This seems very sentimental. Are there not more long-lasting mediums? Especially with laser printing where we can quickly engrave knowledge without the risk of human error or time-consuming manual labor.
> Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it’s emboldened by fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from earlier than 3000 B.C.E.
Ceramic is very stable during time. All modern media that you might think (LP? tapes? Optical disks?) require some special instrument to recover the information, other than simply looking at it (perhaps using some microscope).
Paper degrades. Plastic degrades, in general. Metals rust. But stones and ceramics tend to be very durable, including against microorganisms and chemicals. They just don't withstand mechanical forces, like a hammer. But anyone willing to use a hammer would use any other thing to destroy other medias, too.
Ceramic is too general a term. Clay in particular reacts very badly to fire and moderately badly to water (what matters for long time storage). Very few Sumerian tablets are still around, and most of them partially destructed.
There are many better kinds of ceramic available, even glass would be a better choice.
Yes, I wasn't taking "clay" by its literal term from the news, but thinking that being a ceramicist he would know how to make ceramics that last longer.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi...
http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-int...
This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially) or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the hair of mummies for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy