Ask Slashdot: Permanent Preservation of Human Knowledge?

Wayne2 writes "While there have been many attempts to preserve human knowledge in electronic format, it occurred to me that these attempts all assume that human civilization remains more or less intact. Given humanity's history of growth and collapse with knowledge repeatedly gained then lost, has anyone considered a more permanent solution? I realize that this could be very difficult and/or expensive depending on how long we want to preserve the information and what assumptions we make regarding posterity's ability to access it. Alternatively, are we, as a species, willing to start over if we experience a catastrophe, pandemic, etc. of significant magnitude on a global scale that derails our progress and sends us back to the dark ages or worse?"

Make lots of them.

[SuricouRaven]

If you're planning for the fall and rise of civilisation, you need to prepare for the possibility of deliberate destruction - it's possible that a future civilisation might be so sickened by the actions of the past they seek to destroy all their works, or a religion might emerge which considers your documents heretical and in need of destruction, or perhaps a king feels that his people are living in the shadow of legendary greatness and only by destroying the legend will their story be honored.

So you're going to need to mass-produce whatever storage media you choose - make them by the millions and put them all over the world. In museums, in caves, burried or sunk offshore (Add a big chunk of iron, ready for when the metal detector is reinvented), as many as you can. So many it'd be impossible to destroy them all.

As for the actual storage medium? Tiny etchings on iridium would work. It's corrosion-resistant, and very, very hard wearing. It's last for millenia with ease, even in burried in moist soil or scoured by desert sand, and with such a high melting point it'd be untouched even if the containing building burned down. The only issue is the price: That stuff is expensive. Really expensive. It's cheaper than gold, but not by much.

Repeatedly gained and lost knowledge?

[brit74]

I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale. Sure, there was a regression in Europe after the Greeks and Romans. There were quite a few works lost. And it seems that there was a very early civilization around India that was abandoned (apparently due to crop failures). But the main protection for lost knowledge seems to be to spread knowledge around the world. The world has never simultaneously regressed (the Middle East and China weren't doing so bad during the European dark ages). The works of the Greeks wouldn't have been lost if their writings had larger distribution (instead of being confined to a relatively small area, which makes the fate of those earlier works dependent on the local conditions). As long as people keep writing and reading books, I don't see how much knowledge is going to be lost. There wasn't even much knowledge lost in Europe during the Black Plague - and that killed off 1/3rd of the people in Europe.

Perhaps the concern over "lost knowledge" says a lot about people's perception that some massive apocalyse is going to happen. I think, in general, people tend to grab onto ideas about "apocalypse" (which necessarily results in some massive social rearrangement) because they're not happy with the state of the world. Apocalyptic thinking is a little bit of a fantasy about starting over.

Re:This one gives an idea:

[infolation]

There is one form of information that is very significant for future generations - the locations and contents of Nuclear burial sites. The film 'Into Eternity' about the Finnish sites documents this issue - how do we make sure humans, perhaps 100,000 years hence, understand the nature and toxicity of the contents, without making them curious about discovering what lies within. The Egyptians tried this 4,000 years ago - writing messages warding off potential interlopers to their sacred burial sites. That outcome is perhaps an indication of how a future civilization would perceive our messages.

Re:Already Been Invented: Fired Ceramic Tablets

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Boring? Are you insane? Do you realize how much actually *useful* stuff we manage to glean from garbage piles and laundry lists, as opposed to illuminated genealogies of royal fuckers? Who cares if Henry the whateverth had ulcers on his left leg or on his right leg? Did his peasants wear socks? How often did they wash? What were their daily concerns? *That* is useful stuff for any modern scholar.

Re:Make lots of them.

[Ironhandx]

Tungsten could also work, and is less than 1/10th the cost of iridium.

Re:This one gives an idea:

[ShanghaiBill]

how do we make sure humans, perhaps 100,000 years hence, understand the nature and toxicity of the contents

Why worry about it? In 100,000 years the waste will hardly be more radioactive than natural uranium ore. The entire premise of this concern seems silly to me. What is the chance than 100,000 years from now, our ancestors have the ability to do deep hard rock mining, and have found a use for ores that are worthless to us (that is why we dumped the waste there), yet have no understanding of radioactivity? If that is the case, far more of their miners will die from naturally occurring radon (which they are presumably too ignorant to ventilate) , then nuclear waste.