Re: Building to Last...how long?

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:32:35 GMT, throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop)
wrote:
>Sure, but the one that did was the one that went with size over
>cleverness, prettiness, form, or function. And in many places, Great
>Big Horking Piles of Rocks other than the One of the Seven, have survived
>somewhat better than gardens or statues or lighthouses and such.

Another approach is to go for quantity rather than size. The Rosetta
Project is going this way; their "time capsule" is a micro-etched
nickel disk four inches across that they're planning to mass-produce
and distribute widely. The idea is to play the odds - scatter enough
of these things around and hopefully at least _one_ of them will
survive through the ages.

The Rosetta Project is designed to preserve languages rather than
information about our culture, though, so the details of
implementation might not be ideally suited. I'm thinking once again of
CDs and DVDs - not the most robust or easy-to-read format, but with an
established infrastructure that would make mass production extremely
cheap. Make a hundred thousand copies, seal each set in a reasonably
sturdy container along with printed pages explaining how to the data's
stored, and you could air-drop thousands of them in places where
they're likely to get buried in sediment and unearthed at a later
time. Most will be lost or destroyed, but you only need one to be
discovered by the target civilization.

CDs and DVDs won't be readable in the sense that you could just pop
them in a player and go, since there won't be any players and the
disk's plastic will have degraded. But the mass-produced ones are made
using actual physical "pits" in the aluminium/plastic interface, so
the data will still be present and an interested civilization with
similar technology to our own should be able to dig the data out. As
an added bonus they could do plenty of error-correcting simply by
digging up two or more copies of the thing and comparing them, and if
they're really lucky they might find other disks that _weren't_
intended as time capsules that the time capsule's instruction sheet
will help them read as well.
.

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