The main issue would be loss of language. You’d end up with a gigantic Rosetta Stone of indecipherable gibberish.
Better would be to convert all literature into hieroglyphics, or graphic novels (or both), and then etch them microscopically.
The Long Now Foundation has extensively studied the language loss problem and arrived at a fairly elegant set of solutions.
https://longnow.org/ideas/02022/01/20/linguistic-data-in-the...
Rather I think you vastly underestimate what a billion years can do. The earth itself, and all that was on it, was formed a “few” billion years ago.
Our rivers alone have carved entire valleys into mountain ranges in much, much less time. I doubt a titanium alloy and some unspecified sort of super epoxy stand a chance.
And constant custody with regular restoration cannot be guaranteed for billions of years either.
That’s a massive problem for one plate (and its many copies) alone, more so for millions of unique plates…
The Long Now Foundation is only shooting for 10000 years, as far as I know.
On earth clay tablets have done a great job : we have tablets 6000 years old, so we know that works. That’s 60% of 10k already. Titanium seems expensive and might be melted down in time of need, like bronze has been often in the past. Clay tablets survived partly because it’s a ‘worthless’ material.
The ones that survived
Just don't make them look gold (even if they're not solid gold), or they'll get looted and melted.
Though it would be fun if a murderous warlord ended up with a gotten crown made of the Wikipedia article for toilet paper orientation. [1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
In the next few hundred years it's pretty likely that gold price will be marginal, as asteroid miners looking for less useless materials such as nickel, cobalt and platinum mine an excess.
So no, unless for some hidden reason asteroid mining doesn't work out, which is pretty unlikely given how badly the developed world needs that material.
For the Moon and Mars, carve them into stone there. You'll have to defend against meteor strikes so they'll be carved and stored deep underground. No idea about seismic activity on those bodies.
For outer space, maybe it's pointless because finding, boarding, unloading an interstellar probe and sending the cargo back home is not easy unless you have very advanced interstellar ships. An orbit around the sun could be an easier place to spot. The Library of Ceres or the Library of the Troians?
Orbiting the sun seems like a pretty stellar solution to the whole "keep something close and visible but safe without maintenance" problem.
Plus, think of how exciting it would be for a future civilization to discover that an object orbiting the sun was not a lump of rock!
But of course you need some marker then on the ground so people know where to look for it later if they want to read the data. Maybe some artwork? A giant monolith perhaps?
Perhaps at the D&M pyramid?
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia04745-the-cydonia-dm-pyra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
5d is a bit dramatic but it is a femtosecond laser writing of quartz crystal that should, in theory, be stable for billions of years and can hold hundreds of terabytes.
Seems to be just what is needed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/data-saved-quartz...
The earth will be uninhabitable in that time frame due to changes in the atmosphere and beyond that the sun itself will complete it's lifecycle.
I know there's a big fad to "just believe" in a SF future that spans space and time but physical realities in this area are pretty rough.
I think the best thing people could do is realise that, eventually, everything ends and believing otherwise when it comes to the human race is much like believing in an afterlife.
Imagine if you were an alien species who somehow comes across this capsule hundreds of millions or billions of years from now. It's proof of sentient life elsewhere! But then you date the U-238 and realize that they're probably all dead...
But, they've left all of their civilization, culture, heritage, and knowledge behind. And you get to experience that, even recreate a tiny simulacrum of their world. And it gives you something, it's a tangible form of communication and cooperation across aeons.
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In the short term, the backup is probably useful to have. Imagine if a collection is lost to fire or some other catastrophe, and one of the closer ones could be used to bring it back. Case in point, the fire at Notre-Dame. In 2015, Dr. Andrew Tallon, an art historian, painstakingly scanned all of Notre Dame, https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/04/16/we-have-b...
I think it's important to be honest. Would you have flagged his work as pointless in 2015? After all, the Cathedral has stood for centuries, been photographed so many times, what's the point of a 3D scan?
After 2019's fire, those scans became important (unsure to what degree) to the restoration effort. At some level, by capturing and preserving history, Andrew Tallon helped save history. And now it becomes a part of the story.
That's the goal. To engage in an act of optimism for the betterment of us and all of humanity.
We can barely get to the Moon and have no realistic prospect of making a self-sustaining Mars colony any time soon.
How is it credible to claim we can build starships that can cross lightyears without technological or sociopolitical problems?
The engines - which we're nowhere close to creating - are the easy part.
The real question is, is it worth making it a priority?
It will follow by itself once space mining kicks off. I'm sure Jeff Bezos would like to mine some asteroids.
That kind of claim needs an actual source, because it's not.
The distances are so many orders of magnitude too high for any of today's technologies, making this a pure daydream.
The best we could plausibly do is travel within Sol, and that's not starfaring.
It would have to be a multi generational journey in which any refueling/restocking is impossible and any slip up would cause a full wipeout.
Starfaring is far beyond us... and that's unlikely to ever change for humans with a biological body.
At that point someone can just put it on a thumb drive and take it with.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility that people ultimately inhabit a spaceship that wanders the universe looking for a new home.
We are doing that right now.
> The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
Though other crystals should be highly stable. Quartz seems geologically and chemically stable, plain old glass ain't bad. Something reasonably cheap is probably preferable, both from the cost basis (an expensive-to-create archive is a challenge) and the repurposing challenge (a diamond-etched bibliographic archive might have other appeals to those who chance across it).
Even parchment proved sufficiently valuable that works were often repurposed (and lost) through palimpsests.
isn't the same idea viable if applied to silicon crystals (which we already grow lots of)?
And I'm over here hoping humanity extinguishes itself ASAP so the rest of life can thrive before we kill it all.
Intelligent life seems highly overrated.
I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it.
Something that,
Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve these goals by miniaturizing pages and etching them on some metallic surface (a titanium alloy), depositing a layer of some resilient transparent material onto this surface, and creating multiple copies.A few copies for Earth. 2 or 3 for the Moon. And a few sent out of the solar system on probes like Voyager.
Some simple math, if the pages could fit inside of a 10mm x 10mm, then for a plate that's about the size of an average coffee table at 2' x 4', we could fit 7,432 pages.
Assuming that we have 50 billion pages, we'd need about 6.7 million such plates to fit all of human knowledge, so far.
It sounds crazy, but assuming we could get net costs per plate down to $500, each copy would be about $35M. Or, ~0.14% of an Uber. Alternatively, 0.002% of the F-35 program.
That's doable!
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6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.
Another problem is likely to be organization of the plates/copies. The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
(apologies for any typos, it's very late at my end)