I happened to be over at the Long Now foundation on Thursday when this fellow stopped by for a chat; the Long Now wants to evaluate this storage technique for their language archive, the Rosetta Disk.
The Long Now's solution is to have information at multiple scales:
http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
Note that there is human-readable text around the rim that gets rapidly smaller. That's a clue that you need to keep zooming in. A prototype container is part magnifying glass, and I think the plan is to have instructions at modest resolutions on how to build a 100x microscope, and then more instructions at that scale on how to build what you need to get to the next scale.
Presumably for this nanoscale disc you would apply the principle repeatedly. Each scale contains instructions for getting to the next scale. For the finest scales you'd need a lot of social and technological infrastructure. But there's another Long Now project to get people to think about what that requires:
http://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-...
The question I am yet to find a good answer for, with regards to the Long Now proposal, is this: why?
Like, if you know you're going to have a situation where this immensely important information is going to have to be re-discovered, some distant time into the future, because .. after all, entropy is the natural state of things and who could expect we'll still speak English/C++ 100,000 short years from now .. so we'll teach them again, some day way in the future. But, why? Is it merely to fight the entropy, and say: no matter the light, here is the shadow we cast today, and millions of days, millions of years into the future?
Because that is some mighty high pretense.
However, perhaps you have a better answer, as a more coherent observer of the Long Now technological/social infrastructure? Is it really just to challenge time in a technological sense, or .. perhaps .. is this one area where secularism is becoming what it resists, and indeed such foundations are a new religion/cult/etc.?
You can see what the founders say in their own words here: http://longnow.org/about/
But their basic goal as I see it is: "encourag[ing] the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries".
The disk itself is an example of that. The name obviously hearkens back to the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics for us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
With a copy of the Rosetta Disk, as long as some future finder understands any one language spoken today they'll be able to translate any other materials they find from our era.
Will it survive? Will it be useful? Will it even be necessary? More broadly, what does the future mean to us, and what effect do we want to have on it?
Those are all good questions. And my take is that the real purpose of the Long Now is not to answer them, but to get people asking them. So good work, your post helps fulfill the mission.
There's still some assumptions- that future civilisations will have some knowledge of some of the languages we speak nowadays and so on, but they're probably safe to make, more or less.
There's always the chance that one of those things will only be found by some alien civilisation visiting the Earth in the far future, when there's no humanity left, let alone civilisation- but that's probably a very remote possibility to plan for. Although I guess Voyager 1 already has taken it into account.
Take our plane, rocket and nuclear technology, would it be as advanced relative to other sciences if WW2/the cold war hadn't have happened? If a lot of money and manpower hadn't been ploughed into it relative to other sciences for 30 years?
Also this preservation technology is now available to us going forward, say a catastrophic collapse happened 200 years from now and 2000 years from now they get the technology to decode these things, they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find.
I think I'm worried that science will _not_ advance exactly as it did last time. Right now we have two things: a) the technology to create the physical medium of the message and b) the technology to encode it in a way that is efficient in terms of its storage.
Who's to say that future generations will have both (a) and (b) at the time they come across the message? If they don't, then either they will not recognise it for what it is, or they will not be able to read it, or both.
>> they'd still leap forward 200 years in whatever they find.
Even if there's no collapse, I assume the future will like to know a few things about the past, but of course we can't know. Maybe the future is a boot stepping on a human face, forever and such things as history are not allowed. That would be a development entirely unrelated to technological means, but that would defeat any planning based on assumptions about future technologies. And unfortunately we can't really do much about it except, I don't know- form secret societies for the preservation of knowledge? Like in Nightfall [1]? :/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_stor...
I've asked myself this question numerous times, mostly while staring at the arcane crystalline structures available in meteorites, wondering if in fact there's some way that some parts of the universe aren't, indeed, just a message being left in the sand by a higher power.
How do you figure out that you need to look at nanosctructures inside a chunk of glass (or whatever) and that there's a message in there stored in a certain encoding?
As a way to preserve technological and scientific knowledge in particular, it's a bit pointless. You need to already possess the technology and the science to a) discover the message and b) decipher it.