I'm splitting off a separate thread about
long-term archiving. The
original thread is important enough not to derail it.
This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many
different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation
has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta
Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts.
Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline,
robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy...
[ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :)
]
Kevin Kelly on long-term backups:
http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/
The original y2k event:
http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/
Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up
good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent
price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the
[re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost
knowledge.
You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words
of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel
sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this
laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in
price.
SJ
High purity nickel would appear to run into the intrinsic value issue.
The value of including thumbnails is complicated. On one hand it
solves the translation issue since near 3 million will illustrated
articles is unlikely to present a significant translation challenge to
any moderately advanced civilization. On the other hand they take up
more space than pure text.
--
geni
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