The ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ for severe space weather is based on the Carrington event of 1859, aligned to our current understanding of the vulnerability of modern technologies... Research suggests that a reoccurrence of the Carrington Event has a 1% annual probability...
It is anticipated that the impacts would be:
- localised power outages;
- disruption of satellite operations, including to Global Navigation Satellite System outages (GPS) and SATCOM disturbances;
- disruption to High Frequency communications;
- increased radiation to aircrew and passengers in flight, particularly over polar regions; and
- further disturbances to small-part electronic systems.
Now 'what if' the worlds knowledge had already been buried ages ago by a long gone civilisation, they had the same idea as us to use 'ceramic microfilm'. For your consideration I present the Dropa Stones ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones )
It would be great if similar archives were distributed in salt mines around the world. Having a single point of failure in Austria does not sound very robust.
They should also sell those tokens as a means of generating revenue. I'd buy some and hand them down.
The article also talks about the possibility of civilizations losing the ability to read in three generations, but there's no mention of a plan to deal with that. These archives would be mostly useless to an illiterate society, except maybe as objects of wonder or worship.
That would be an interesting challenge, actually -- how could you teach an illiterate, collapsed civilization to read if they don't have access to electronic gadgets like audio players, computers, monitors, or projectors?
My first thought is to have some audio on wax cylinders with hand-cranked players or something. But then there's no guarantee that the hearers will even speak the language. Assuming the language is similar enough, though, it would still be challenging to teach someone to read merely by such primitive audio recordings. They'd have to be paired with some visual aids, and the people listening would have to be really motivated to learn.
OP means the tokens that have the map on them. The gift store sells tablets.
Insta-edit: I see you also get a token with your tablet. Original article should be updated, then, because it says
> For this reason, Memory of Mankind will has engraved some small tokens with a map pinpointing the archives’ location, which they will then bury at strategic places around the world. Other tokens are being entrusted to 50 holders who will pass them onto the next generation.
... as if these are the only ones.
In any case, they should sell tokens for much cheaper. If more people buy them, (a) they'll make more revenue, and (b) there will be more maps scattered around the Earth.
It's probably more true that you realize. Salt mines across many countries are being used to store all sorts of knowledge.
For instance here in Kansas is a huge salt mine that Hollywood uses to store original prints of many many classic films and works.
In Kansas City Missouri is one of the largest underground limestone cavern converted to storage for all forms of records. From film to paper archives for government.
I imagine it's more coming than we think because it's not sexy and these types of facilities do not get much press.
That's great, although that's a long shot from this project. Ideally a project like this should contain much of humanity's knowledge and history, include multiple languages, and be in a form that can last thousands of years. And then mark it's location somehow so people in the future can find it.
Space is really harsh on electronic storage making long term storage impractical. Sending hard copies like those shown is ridiculously expensive, roughly replace everything you want to send to the moon with solid gold for a cost estimate.
Yes I'm sure the tech is not there yet and I'm not saying make a hard copy and send it to space.... but how far are we off? Hundreds of years or decades? Is there an iterative process... perhaps satellites at first (since landing is generally complicated).
I guess it also depends on what you want to store and what you use to store. There are crystals that could store data for pretty much eternity [1].
The problem with shoving stuff in a hidden salt mine is that no one (ie aliens, future people etc) will know where it is where as on the moon or satellite you can effectively have a much more salient sign of here is the data (ie what is worse the data is destroyed or the data is never found?).
The problem with the moon is that it's being constantly bombarded by small rocks - anything you place on the surface will be eventually hit. So you want to bury things - and that's a completely different scope of problem than just landing things on the moon.
"Be wary, wanderer. One of those caves contains the lost knowledge of the ancient civilization that came before us. The other will kill you in a slow, painful way. Are you up to the challenge?"
One of the biggest problems with putting all this in a single location is that, no matter how secure the location is from the elements, it is not secure to people (or else it would be useless).
Given the length of time imagined, I think the odds that the place is accessible by individuals or groups who believe they should destroy the data approaches 100%.
See the deliberate destruction of ancient sites all across the Middle East. See the sacking of Rome by the Vandals, the *goths, and the Normans. See the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. See the rise in religious extremists who seem specifically to hate artifacts belonging to other cultures on their soil.
How does a physical repository of human knowledge defend itself against this?
I personally agree with you but this is how they attempt to address that point on their website:
> The token shows the location in such a way that a future civilization will be able to interpret its correct meaning. This will require a technical and scientific understanding which is comparable to our own. This is the guarantee that the archive is suitably protected from premature access. Only a civilization which fulfils these requirements will be able to find the archive as well as being able to process, decipher and comprehend its content. The depiction on the token: Two intersecting lines span a map of Europe.
Is there a chance that knowledge of entire languages are lost to catastrophe/time? What use are tablets in English, French, German, etc. if no one can decipher them?
There's certainly a chance that that will happen, yes. We don't need a catastrophe for that, just different socio-economic conditions that don't favor reading, writing and doing intellectual things, generally speaking.
On top of that languages like English, French and German are pretty "new", so to speak, I mean they're not older than 1000 years, at the most. I'm pretty sure most native English speakers need a "modernized" version of Chaucer's works (meaning a translation) in order to understand what he wanted to say, and the same goes for the French and Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel". 2,000 years ago no-one on this continent (Europe) was speaking neither French, nor English, nor German, so it's plausible that in another 2,000 years these languages will have changed to the point of becoming new ones.
There is nothing keeping more people from learning it, though; as soon as a few people have learned it, the knowledge about a language can be proliferated to others. It's just that we generally don't care a lot (beyond employing a few thousand(?) people world-wide per language) for ancient texts.
Of course; we can't read Linear A right now. Entire languages being lost is the norm, not the exception.
Many languages have been lost and since recovered. In general, you want to have some knowledge of the language; for example, knowledge of Coptic (its modern descendant) was helpful in deciphering ancient Egyptian. Akkadian, a common language for old cuneiform texts, is a semitic language, like Hebrew and Arabic. Akkadian was lost, but Hebrew was preserved pretty well, and that helped in understanding Akkadian.
Sumerian is related to no known modern language. We can read it anyway, because mesopotamian scribal training documents, of which we have lots, specifically deal with training the student in Sumerian. Similarly, if German was lost, German records might still be salvageable if someone found an old German textbook for Japanese students and could figure out the Japanese.
Why not sapphire instead of stone? I guess it's stone they don't go into much detail about the medium used even on their website and the two videos explaining the project.
A company called Fahrenheit 2451 makes sapphire disk that can withstand high temperatures and supposedly lasts one million years.
Fahrenheit 2451 is still tying to get funding but they seem to be able to make/grow the disks already.
They probably picked stone for its low intrinsic value as otherwise there would be an incentive to plunder it. This is a fairly important consideration for something that needs to last long term.
> maybe there is more of a chance the disk and information on it will be found if it is valuable. A rock may be ignored because it's so common
Well, a modern first-worlder wouldn't ignore a rock covered in writing, but peasants overwhelmingly do just that.
If you want durability, stone isn't a good choice either; poor communities repurpose worked stone into the things they want, because breaking up a big wall somebody else put up a long time ago is much easier than quarrying your own new stone and hauling it back to town. Tungsten would probably be a good choice -- a primitive society would be unable to melt it.
Why is sapphire considered a precious stone? Sapphires can't be manufactured in a knowledge and resource scarce environment, and it needed to be dug out of the ground in specific places. Sapphire manufacturing is a modern achievement.
>> They probably picked stone for its low intrinsic value as otherwise there would be an incentive to plunder it.
I assumed this was talking about modern people plundering the material. For them, sapphire has very low value.
For primitive people, sapphire might have higher value, although a large block would be very difficult to cut. Easy to smash, though. But any kind of stone (that could hold a carved message) would be extremely valuable, and very prone to plundering; plundering of stone buildings for material is routine throughout history, as I've already pointed out an inch or so away from this comment.
> Why is sapphire considered a precious stone?
Not for any intrinsic value. You might be interested to know that the 5 traditional precious stones are diamond (carbon), emerald (something complicated, green variety), sapphire (aluminum oxide), ruby (also aluminum oxide, red variety), and... amethyst, which is silicon dioxide, or quartz, one of the most common materials (and crystals) that exists. Amethyst is a purple variety. It was considered a precious stone because it was rare, and it is no longer considered a precious stone not because we learned to manufacture it, but because we discovered a gigantic cave full of amethyst in Brazil, source of amethyst to the world.
Perhaps we should form an organization of a few thousand people and dedicate it to safeguarding this location, making sure it never falls prey to local politics and other unpleasantness during the temporary fall of what we currently consider civilized culture. This foundation would need a descriptive name, and could probably use a plucky mayor to get things done. And we should set up a second one about a thousand miles off the coast of New Zealand.
If my calculations are correct, this should reduce the length of this neo-dark-age from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.
Seeing as the GP's comment is the top one at this point, I guess quite a lot of other people got the reference. For those who didn't, here's a hint (trying not to spoil it): great SciFi series. Some may say the greatest.
...
and I'm back from a bit of wikipedia rabbit hole. Found out even Elon Musk is a fan [1]
The foundation should aggregate all of human knowledge in one giant encyclopedia, which should be of help even when mankind venture to the galaxies after the dark age.
45 comments
[ 37.3 ms ] story [ 1083 ms ] threadThe ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ for severe space weather is based on the Carrington event of 1859, aligned to our current understanding of the vulnerability of modern technologies... Research suggests that a reoccurrence of the Carrington Event has a 1% annual probability...
It is anticipated that the impacts would be:
- localised power outages;
- disruption of satellite operations, including to Global Navigation Satellite System outages (GPS) and SATCOM disturbances;
- disruption to High Frequency communications;
- increased radiation to aircrew and passengers in flight, particularly over polar regions; and
- further disturbances to small-part electronic systems.
Anything that hasn't already stood the test of time to some extent e.g. anything created in the last 20 years.
Maybe fake but still food for thought.
They should also sell those tokens as a means of generating revenue. I'd buy some and hand them down.
The article also talks about the possibility of civilizations losing the ability to read in three generations, but there's no mention of a plan to deal with that. These archives would be mostly useless to an illiterate society, except maybe as objects of wonder or worship.
That would be an interesting challenge, actually -- how could you teach an illiterate, collapsed civilization to read if they don't have access to electronic gadgets like audio players, computers, monitors, or projectors?
My first thought is to have some audio on wax cylinders with hand-cranked players or something. But then there's no guarantee that the hearers will even speak the language. Assuming the language is similar enough, though, it would still be challenging to teach someone to read merely by such primitive audio recordings. They'd have to be paired with some visual aids, and the people listening would have to be really motivated to learn.
That is the point. http://memory-of-mankind.com/giftshop
Insta-edit: I see you also get a token with your tablet. Original article should be updated, then, because it says
> For this reason, Memory of Mankind will has engraved some small tokens with a map pinpointing the archives’ location, which they will then bury at strategic places around the world. Other tokens are being entrusted to 50 holders who will pass them onto the next generation.
... as if these are the only ones.
In any case, they should sell tokens for much cheaper. If more people buy them, (a) they'll make more revenue, and (b) there will be more maps scattered around the Earth.
For instance here in Kansas is a huge salt mine that Hollywood uses to store original prints of many many classic films and works.
In Kansas City Missouri is one of the largest underground limestone cavern converted to storage for all forms of records. From film to paper archives for government.
I imagine it's more coming than we think because it's not sexy and these types of facilities do not get much press.
Maybe have a couple of those probes become read only after a couple of centuries (to avoid a hack/attack of overwriting and blowing away all data).
The moon has very few impacts with asteroids and very little geo activity.
I guess it also depends on what you want to store and what you use to store. There are crystals that could store data for pretty much eternity [1].
The problem with shoving stuff in a hidden salt mine is that no one (ie aliens, future people etc) will know where it is where as on the moon or satellite you can effectively have a much more salient sign of here is the data (ie what is worse the data is destroyed or the data is never found?).
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/technology/5d-data-storage-m...
Given the length of time imagined, I think the odds that the place is accessible by individuals or groups who believe they should destroy the data approaches 100%.
See the deliberate destruction of ancient sites all across the Middle East. See the sacking of Rome by the Vandals, the *goths, and the Normans. See the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. See the rise in religious extremists who seem specifically to hate artifacts belonging to other cultures on their soil.
How does a physical repository of human knowledge defend itself against this?
Multiple copies stored in multiple diverse locations in multiple ways.
> The token shows the location in such a way that a future civilization will be able to interpret its correct meaning. This will require a technical and scientific understanding which is comparable to our own. This is the guarantee that the archive is suitably protected from premature access. Only a civilization which fulfils these requirements will be able to find the archive as well as being able to process, decipher and comprehend its content. The depiction on the token: Two intersecting lines span a map of Europe.
On top of that languages like English, French and German are pretty "new", so to speak, I mean they're not older than 1000 years, at the most. I'm pretty sure most native English speakers need a "modernized" version of Chaucer's works (meaning a translation) in order to understand what he wanted to say, and the same goes for the French and Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel". 2,000 years ago no-one on this continent (Europe) was speaking neither French, nor English, nor German, so it's plausible that in another 2,000 years these languages will have changed to the point of becoming new ones.
Language can go extinct in a way that nobody can learn them anymore
Many languages have been lost and since recovered. In general, you want to have some knowledge of the language; for example, knowledge of Coptic (its modern descendant) was helpful in deciphering ancient Egyptian. Akkadian, a common language for old cuneiform texts, is a semitic language, like Hebrew and Arabic. Akkadian was lost, but Hebrew was preserved pretty well, and that helped in understanding Akkadian.
Sumerian is related to no known modern language. We can read it anyway, because mesopotamian scribal training documents, of which we have lots, specifically deal with training the student in Sumerian. Similarly, if German was lost, German records might still be salvageable if someone found an old German textbook for Japanese students and could figure out the Japanese.
A company called Fahrenheit 2451 makes sapphire disk that can withstand high temperatures and supposedly lasts one million years.
Fahrenheit 2451 is still tying to get funding but they seem to be able to make/grow the disks already.
All we want is for the information to be read by someone after that it doesn't matter what happens to the thing it's written on.
Well, a modern first-worlder wouldn't ignore a rock covered in writing, but peasants overwhelmingly do just that.
If you want durability, stone isn't a good choice either; poor communities repurpose worked stone into the things they want, because breaking up a big wall somebody else put up a long time ago is much easier than quarrying your own new stone and hauling it back to town. Tungsten would probably be a good choice -- a primitive society would be unable to melt it.
I assumed this was talking about modern people plundering the material. For them, sapphire has very low value.
For primitive people, sapphire might have higher value, although a large block would be very difficult to cut. Easy to smash, though. But any kind of stone (that could hold a carved message) would be extremely valuable, and very prone to plundering; plundering of stone buildings for material is routine throughout history, as I've already pointed out an inch or so away from this comment.
> Why is sapphire considered a precious stone?
Not for any intrinsic value. You might be interested to know that the 5 traditional precious stones are diamond (carbon), emerald (something complicated, green variety), sapphire (aluminum oxide), ruby (also aluminum oxide, red variety), and... amethyst, which is silicon dioxide, or quartz, one of the most common materials (and crystals) that exists. Amethyst is a purple variety. It was considered a precious stone because it was rare, and it is no longer considered a precious stone not because we learned to manufacture it, but because we discovered a gigantic cave full of amethyst in Brazil, source of amethyst to the world.
If my calculations are correct, this should reduce the length of this neo-dark-age from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.
... and I'm back from a bit of wikipedia rabbit hole. Found out even Elon Musk is a fan [1]
[1] http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/the-science-fiction-books-th...
One foundation will keep all of human knowledge, while the universe goes at war for 1000 years straight.
Spoiler Alert: A second foundation, secret and hidden even from the first one, will keep all of human knowledge as well and protect the first one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
The english article is not very extensive, but on the german one you'll see at least a few pictures of the storage https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen