Dear Future Earthlings
A message in a bottle won’t be enough to communicate with distant generations
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346713/title/Dear_Future_Earthlings
I don’t think I have blogged on this topic before, but I have exchanged a few ideas on the topic with a friend and figured I would mention it here. I like this idea of creating (relatively) cheap, very long-term storage that can also be computer readable. Much like a CD/DVD records bits, the sapphire disk could also record bits. Information to decode the bits could then be placed repeatedly along the edge of the disk and all that would be needed is the soul of a cryptographer, a microscope and a lot of time. The density of information could be quite high. I had (integrated circuit fabrication) masks made for me by supplying a CAD drawing that could make objects less than ten micrometers (see here if interested; it was surprisingly inexpensive). With bits 10 um on a side I calculate that you could fit 6,451,600 bits per square inch (806,450 bytes). Get 1 um on a side (something that is surely feasible) and now you can store 645,160,000 bits per square inch (or 80,645,000 bytes). The main advantage of that is you could, using the bulk processing of integrated circuit fabrication, very quickly produce completely different information on a large number of wafers, then scatter sets of them about the planet to be discovered at some point in the long distant future and hopefully decoded.
BTW, if you are interested in the manufacturer noted in the article, here is an entry into their English site: ARNANO
