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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
Hi all. OK, flame me if you wish but read on... I got to thinking "How would I build a device that would survive human extinction, for long enough for another intelligent land dwelling lifeform to evolve?"
best bet seems to be to start with a gold shell, about 15cm thick on all sides. Inside this put an inner layer of something highly absorbent (silicon aerogel comes to mind) supported by titanium springs. In this put a second gold box containing 24 32GB microSD cards (the highest density currently available) and four 512MB microSD, as well as a the stable elements in a "periodic table" arrangement between two sheets of gold or possibly diamond (due to x-ray transparency) Additionally the sheet contains on a separate area a row of known superconductors arranged in ascending order of Tc ,samples of the basic stable biological compounds under gold, and samples of useful compounds such as ZnS:Mg and carbon nanotubes.
On each of the 512's go a full description of mathematics from base concepts, table of the known elements, basic computer science, basic biology, chemistry and physics, prime number tables and a backup of the filesystems for the 32GB's plus information needed to build an SDHC reader from 1947 level technology.
Four of the 32GBs each contain the full genome (including mitochondrial, nuclear and intracellular proteins as well as bacterial genomes) of an individual human being of note, as well as a diagram of a typical human body including neural structures (that can be resolved using pulse compensated high field MRI) down to the subcellular level.
The rest each contain a total overview of as much useful information as can be reliably compressed without loss, the sum works of humanity (such as literature, philiosophy, science etc) and other useful information including recent and geological history, known superconductors, star charts, nearby pulsars and their current timings, etc.
for various reasons the information on the 512's will also be engraved in binary with reducing sizes onto a piece of silicon carbide which forms the inner casing and separates the layers of cards from each other.
Once built each stack will then be resistant to:- shock, vibration, heat (thanks to the aerogel), radiation, and most other environmental trauma.
The whole thing will then be sealed up by laser welding under vacuum to completely seal it.
The outside will then be engraved with a description of the contents in binary.
maybe include this thing on the next space probe sent out of the solar system, or better still bury it a few tens of feet down in the Martian or lunar soil with a magnetic pointer above it (or some rare non native isotope such as Ta180m or U233 that would get the attention of a future species)
Interestingly if someone did find such a thing it might resemble a typical gold "brick" you may find in archaeological digs throughout the world. Maybe check the Smithsonian? :) (evidence of prehistoric chip level technology would be world changing news)
EDIT:- thanks for your suggestions guys, I have added them to the original post.
Registered Member #540
Joined: Mon Feb 19 2007, 07:49PM
Location: MIT
Posts: 969
What if they don't know how to use micro SD cards? I would think that a physical engraving on gold would be better but if they can't read English or any other language we speak today...
Registered Member #902
Joined: Sun Jul 15 2007, 08:17PM
Location: North Texas
Posts: 1040
It is actually an important topic to discuss: even if humanity does not become extinct, will our descendants (after some tragic event or just a really long length of time) understand us? I know for a fact that at some major nuclear waste disposals, intended to last for centuries, they have the warnings put in every language that is considered to have a chance at surviving, as well as various historical, artistic, and instinctive renderings in pictogram form. (for example: the traditional radioactive labels, but also the unorthodox such as an image of a living creature dying, hieroglyphic like images, and most famously they use Edvard Munch's "the Scream").
The point of the above paragraph is that there are real considerations about making our culture, language, and history easily understood by those in the distant future. Whether the reasons be to protect them from radioactive waste, or to simply preserve our way of life and our history.
Your thought would seem practical: Gold is very resistant to corrosion (except with aqua regia ), solid state memory would last longer than magnetic drives and be shock resistant, binary might be easier than modern language to decode as it doesn't have various accents or numerous symbols, etc.
One suggestion: don't only draw the basics and fundamentals on the surface of the chips/other media, show it! - include a hologram of the human anatomy and possibly include a holographic data storage disk in conjunction with the solid state media, as these disks can hold a lot of information and if there design were included in the other media so they could use it, then we could throw in a lot more uncompressed data about human history and society as a whole.... the only concern about this is the shelf life of Holographic storage disks, which I am unsure of.
-Jimmy
IIRC, on one of NASA's satellites (one of the ones that went WAY out and never to return) they planted a large gold disk with Binary code describing much of important, modern human history.
Registered Member #2099
Joined: Wed Apr 29 2009, 12:22AM
Location: Los Altos, California
Posts: 1716
I would not trust modern solid state NVM devices to hold data for 100 years, much less a million. Magnetic storage (at less than state-of-the-art density ) would IMHO last longer -- the paleomagnetic record is known for hundreds of millions of years. First choice would be mechanically engraved patterns (as in CD or DVD) on a durable substrate (gold-coated quartz instead of aluminum-coated polycarbonate?)
It's been said that we could never reconstitute fossil DNA from dinosaurs (as in Jurassic Park). Life tolerates background radiation because DNA is continuously refreshed. How many fatal doses is 100 M years of radiation from isotopes in ordinary fossil-embedding rocks?
... not Russel! Registered Member #1
Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052
DaJJHman wrote ...
IIRC, on one of NASA's satellites (one of the ones that went WAY out and never to return) they planted a large gold disk with Binary code describing much of important, modern human history.
You're thinking of the Voyager Golden Record. Unfortunately, the record was designed in the late 1970's, and as such, all the information encoded on it is analog, not digital. There's something close to 100 pictures, a large number of musical recordings, greetings recorded in 55 languages, and a statement in English by the then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. If I remember correctly, among the analog images is a printed statement by the US President at the time, Jimmy Carter. The back side of the record contains a one-hour recording of human brainwaves. The record's cover includes instructions on how to play the record and decode the images, as well as Earth's position relative to a number of pulsars.
Because of the limitations of the time, the total amount of data encoded on the record is relatively small. It is a short but fascinating glimpse into life on Earth in the late 20th century. Today, of course, we could convey much, much more information. A relatively small repository of knowledge could contain a library's worth of text, thousands of high-resolution pictures, and many hours of audio and video. It is tempting to consider. What would we save? What would we want to tell extraterrestrial or distant terrestrial life about ourselves?
Conundrum wrote ...
I got to thinking "How would I build a device that would survive human extinction, for long enough for another intelligent land dwelling lifeform to evolve?"
Unfortunately, we don't know how long that may be. If humans suddenly die off and leave the planet largely intact, it could be anywhere from a few million years to never again. There's no telling how often intelligent life tends to arise when conditions are favorable. We know the earth will probably not be habitable by complex lifeforms within two billion years or so, so any repository of knowledge should be able to survive at least that long in order to be a useful backup.
maybe include this thing on the next space probe sent out of the solar system?
If it is to be useful for future humans or other future intelligent life on earth, sending it out of the solar system will essentially destroy it. After just a few thousand years, it will be mind-bogglingly far away; impossible to detect and nearly impossible to retrieve. By the same token, leaving it somewhere on earth would be staggeringly irresponsible. I cannot imagine what the consequences might have been, had another advanced culture's Wikipedia been unearthed in Egypt in 1800, but I think the world would be a very different place. Something clever would have to be done, to ensure that only an advanced culture could retrieve the knowledge, while also ensuring that it isn't too hard to find, or too likely to be destroyed.
Registered Member #2123
Joined: Sat May 16 2009, 03:10AM
Location: Bend, Oregon
Posts: 312
Arthur C. Clarke already figured part of this out with the monolith buried on the moon (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly).
You wouldn't want your new intelligent race to discover your artifact too soon, they'd likely just melt down the gold, and toss the rest into the hearth. Best to leave it somewhere hard to get to like 10 meters below the lunar surface.
As for the message medium, since solid state memory is stored as charge, millions of years worth of cosmic rays and alpha particles from nuclear decay would cause lots of bit flips corrupting the data files making this approach unreliable. Perhaps optical storage using diamond substrates would be long-lived.
There was an effort back in the 1970's to come up with a way to communicate to future human civilizations the danger of a nuclear waste site for the next fifty thousand years. Never heard on what they decided, but I recall that an image of a human skull on a stainless metal plaque was one of the main contenders.
Registered Member #2261
Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581
I've thought in the past about the similar problem of preserving human knowledge against the collapse of society. Not as drastic as extinction I know, but it would still be a bit of a drag. Imagine you're the richest person in the world and you want to do something really good with your vast wealth that will have an ever lasting positive impact. You'd want to draw on the best knowledge available to decide what that would be and you'd want to protect it from all imaginable disasters in the future. On a day to day basis that might consist of a bunch of lawyers and administrators protecting the systems you put in place but if you want it to be truly long term it will need to survive social change including a total collapse of society. In fact, aiding the recovery of such a collapse might be one of the longer term goals of this foundation. It would probably include a repository of human knowledge designed to survive until the world gets back on its feet and I think that would need to be similar in design to nuclear waste depository intended to last through geological time. Lessons can be learnt from the Pyramids. Could the organisation somehow be reliably restarted by the uncovering of the repository? I can't see how, but certainly choosing what form to store the data in is a major quandary.
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
interesting notes guys. i did also wonder if a memory chip would under some conditions be *more* durable than DNA, as K-40 is radioactive. Perhaps also include a visual description of a "blown up" molecule or 20, with actual atoms shown by element samples and interatomic distances with dashed lines to indicate the direction and angle of the bonds relative to the central group.
that ought to help a bit even if the data in all the chips is corrupted beyond repair or unreadable due to degradation from phosphate corrosion etc.
don't forget that quadruple redundancy might enable one of the four DNA strands to be reconstructed using information from the other three assuming non uniform damage pattern.
EDIT:- contrary to popular belief "lost" data in a memory chip can in fact be recovered because writing and reading data slightly weakens the material so it tunnels at a lower voltage. Using sufficiently powerful technology such as atomic force microscopy the data could be reconstructed.
Just for fun, also include a solar and kinetic circuit energised using SiC cells, multi wavelength UV through IR flashing indicator that powers up once the brick receives enough light, on both outer and inner "bricks" on both sides just beneath the surface. Hopefully any advanced species will realise that the "gold brick" flashing out seemingly random patterns is unusual and investigate further... (kudos to the late Arthur C Clarke for coming up with this idea) -A "Bother" said Pooh, as the Ancient Repository of Knowledge had a bad sector...
Registered Member #543
Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992
I can see no reason why H. Sapiens should not, in time, join all the other species now represented only as fossils. Evolution will not stall on our account.
Your 'time capsule' might be seen as an attempt to ensure that the very means by which Homo came to organize its own extinction could somehow be a great boon to future life to come.
Your archaeological hoard seems to me to contain your own articles of faith, in their own way not so very different to the rotting parchments and crumbling scrolls of god beliefs.
Graveyards are full of people who all thought they were indispensable.
Registered Member #902
Joined: Sun Jul 15 2007, 08:17PM
Location: North Texas
Posts: 1040
MinorityCarrier wrote ...
Arthur C. Clarke already figured part of this out with the monolith buried on the moon (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly).
You wouldn't want your new intelligent race to discover your artifact too soon, they'd likely just melt down the gold, and toss the rest into the hearth. Best to leave it somewhere hard to get to like 10 meters below the lunar surface.
As for the message medium, since solid state memory is stored as charge, millions of years worth of cosmic rays and alpha particles from nuclear decay would cause lots of bit flips corrupting the data files making this approach unreliable. Perhaps optical storage using diamond substrates would be long-lived.
There was an effort back in the 1970's to come up with a way to communicate to future human civilizations the danger of a nuclear waste site for the next fifty thousand years. Never heard on what they decided, but I recall that an image of a human skull on a stainless metal plaque was one of the main contenders.
if you didn't see my post near the top, they settled on Munch's "The Scream" as their universal warning, along with every other warning that is standard in picture form and several languages.
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<OT> The Ultimate Backup..
), solid state memory would last longer than magnetic drives and be shock resistant, binary might be easier than modern language to decode as it doesn't have various accents or numerous symbols, etc.
