We were having an interesting discussion at coffee this morning about information, and how bureaucracies like to collect it even if they can't find a use for it. The context was that granting agencies are now asking for the DOIs of published papers. Naturally the topic wandered a little, and someone brought up the idea that all our papers should be engraved on stone tablets because eventually our civilization will progress to the stage that current technology will be lost, and all our research will become inaccessible.
"If the Rosetta Stone had been on floppy we'd never have been able to interpret hieroglyphics" was one memorable argument.
This isn't a bad idea, stone being a pretty robust sort of material, and it also gets round the problem of trees being cut down for paper, so it's green as well. We could employ grad students to chisel away in deep quarries, this being great training for a career in research (chip, chip, chip. . .).
But why stop there? I asked. There's a huge lump of rock orbiting the Earth that's not being used for much and doesn't have huge amounts of moisture-laden atmosphere to degrade the keeping qualities of solid rock. NASA is desperate for a scientific reason to relaunch manned Moon missions, so why not combine the two projects? Couple this with remotely-controlled robotics to do the actual chiselling — maybe set up a RAID involving Mars and/or some of the more well-behaved asteroids —, and you've got the perfect off-site backup in case the Earth suffers a terminal systems crash.
Brilliant.
Comments
Funnily enough, off-planet backups are the sort of thing the good folks at Archive.org are discussing. I have a video of the Archive's Brewster Kahle explaining what they're up to on this page, but in short, anything that goes into the Archive is mirrored across multiple sites on multiple continents. This is explicitly to avoid the 'Library of Alexandria situation,' where the central repository gets wiped out. And yes, they're talking about the desirability of off-planet backups, in case this one should get walloped by a dirty great meteorite.
(hmm: not clear if I can do links here. The video is at http://quernstone.com/notcon04/)
Posted by: Jonathan Sanderson | June 28, 2006 04:33 PM
Interestingly enough Voyagers 1 and 2 carried a gold album with some sounds and images recorded upon them.
It also contained spoken greetings, the first of which is in Akkadian (just in case any Sumarians made it to space before us.)
A more recent mission included a CD.
It's not quite off-planet backup - but it is kinda like a Rosetta stone for any aliens that feek like greeting us in Akkadian.
Posted by: yv | June 28, 2006 04:55 PM
What you're both missing is the desirability of a backup/archive that is not dependent on advanced technology.
The hypothetical alien coming across the Voyagers will need to figure out how to play the damn' things. Our descendants in ten thousand years' time, on their way back from Europa to a trashed Earth, will thank us for leaving our accumulated knowledge in a form that is robust, macroscopic, and not rendered useless by the lack of readily available lasers, diamonds or moving parts.
Of course, this does not mean we can not use advanced tech to make the things in the first place: I'm sure that lithoscription robots and lithopages can be developed to such an extent that the storage capacity approaches that of paper, all the while without sacrificing future readability. You should go and lobby your government to fund lithotechnology now.
Stone: You know it makes sense.
Posted by: Black Knight | June 28, 2006 06:20 PM