As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
If you want reliable media to last on a timeline relevant to our lives and even several generations, look into M disc blurays. Though, similar to dual layer dvds back in the day, it’s much easier to find a writer than the media itself. But it claims lifespans of centuries to millennia rather than decades usually associated with other disc media. They are actually etched instead of just using some fancy ink. Readable by normal drives, too. It’s just on the writing side that you need one that can specifically handle M discs. It also supports multi-layers, but those are even harder to find and get pretty pricey.
Still not likely a way to pass information ahead to civilizations even tens of thousands of years away, and even before they break down, a new civilization would need to figure out how to read and interpret them (when we had trouble reading hieroglyphs from known civilizations that we could read directly with our eyes).
But at least they should be relatively safe to write, verify, then forget about for a few decades until you find them and want to take a walk down memory lane. Assuming you can still get a bluray reader at that point, or held on to one. Pack them together and future you or your heirs might be grateful.
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
If you want reliable media to last on a timeline relevant to our lives and even several generations, look into M disc blurays. Though, similar to dual layer dvds back in the day, it’s much easier to find a writer than the media itself. But it claims lifespans of centuries to millennia rather than decades usually associated with other disc media. They are actually etched instead of just using some fancy ink. Readable by normal drives, too. It’s just on the writing side that you need one that can specifically handle M discs. It also supports multi-layers, but those are even harder to find and get pretty pricey.
Still not likely a way to pass information ahead to civilizations even tens of thousands of years away, and even before they break down, a new civilization would need to figure out how to read and interpret them (when we had trouble reading hieroglyphs from known civilizations that we could read directly with our eyes).
But at least they should be relatively safe to write, verify, then forget about for a few decades until you find them and want to take a walk down memory lane. Assuming you can still get a bluray reader at that point, or held on to one. Pack them together and future you or your heirs might be grateful.