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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I love the fictional idea that I have that some billionaire will create multiple underground caverns around the world in geologically stable places, each containing the knowledge of the world - engraved onto aluminum plates. A vast cavern of tunnels and chambers and catacombs built only to preserve the worlds knowledge.

I imagine in 10,000 years some future explorers making their way into such a cavern and finding all of the knowledge of the present time like some sort of treasure.

Perhaps with a big engraving of the God Jeff Bezos engraved in the stone wall for eternity.

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There's a few projects like that already happening, like Github's code repository on Svalbard.

That said, I think one big reason why the artifacts mentioned - Sumerians, Mayans, Egyptians, or even Vesuvius - were preserved was because they were lost; buried in the desert, overgrown in dense jungles, buried under volcanic rock and ash, etc.

For something to stand the test of time, it has to be lost. Al-Quaeda and ISIS have destroyed visible historic monuments and documents, for example, and some people in the US are advocating for the removal and burning of certain books as well.

So yeah, underground caves and hidden monuments would probably be best, although the collapse of society may take care of that as well.

Another option: Time capsules of data sent out into space in containers that can survive re-entry in thousands of years. Ideally with a lot of flashy light effects and a persistent smoke trail on re-entry.

The space container idea could make for a really interesting book plot. It starts in modern day where they send the capsule up. Then skips forward several hundred years to society collapsing. Then skip forward a few hundred more to see how the myth of knowledge falling from the sky is being passed down. Then it keeps skipping ahead to see how the myth evolves. By the end you just have some super cryptic prophecy like "god will descend from the heavens to bring about heaven on earth" and then it actually happens.

They open the capsule, and find that it contains nothing but a complete transcript of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.

You say that as a joke, but it would say a lot about contemporary American culture.

Just think about the gender roles on display, a women attacks her husband and gloats that society will side with her. Not to mention the meta-layer, the celebrity worship that would compel someone to preserve this particular document of all things.

That's a joke, but real time capsules often aren't as interesting as they could be because the makers of them put things that they think are important (like a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt if he was President of the US at the time) rather than details of what their daily lives were like which they didn't think of including.

Highly recommend reading A Canticle for Leibowitz - it's a masterpiece that deals with exactly this over (can't exactly remember) 2 thousand years

Appreciate the recommendation. I'll check it out

>>Another option: Time capsules of data sent out into space in containers that can survive re-entry in thousands of years. Ideally with a lot of flashy light effects and a persistent smoke trail on re-entry.

Interesting idea indeed! How to solve the issue that there is a ~70% chance the capsules will re-enter and fall into an ocean area?

If it’s not a projectile, we have the tech already. Landing on Mars is done autonomously today but making a robot/computer to last more than 1000 years isn’t in our wheelhouse yet.

>>making a robot/computer to last more than 1000 years isn’t in our wheelhouse yet.

Yes, exactly my point - we can very nicely control landings to within a meter today. How can we make a craft land with any precision say 2-5000 years in the future? It'll require a power source good for 5000 years, a computer that still operates flawlessly for 5000 years, fuel that doesn't evaporate or degrade for 5000 years, and a rocket engine system that will operate properly in 5000 years. Even reduce that spec to 1000 years, or just a 500 years, and I don't see how we get there with today's tech.

Make millions of them and some will last outlier timespans. One low-power lightbulb that has been illuminated for over a hundred years:

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-b...

Yes.

Making millions of them would likely also make all the other problems go away. Wit a million copies, we can forget about the controlled re-entry. While around 700k of them will sink in the oceans, there should still be 300,000 that will fall on land.

As long as the initial orbits, drag profiles, heat absorbtion profiles/patterns, etc. are sufficiently randomized so they all truly re-enter in a random pattern, there should be no need for propellant, engines, power, or controlled re-entry.

Perhaps, rather than have it orbit the earth for thousands of years, you could send it on a single, long trip. By having the projectile far away from earth, other satellites, and other gravity sources, you could improve precision and aim for exactly the center of the largest landmass. Or you could intentionally land in the ocean and make it float.

I like the message in a bottle approach! Maybe just flood the Earth with thousands of "bottles" which are shaped/constructed in a way as to not burn up on re-entry, land gently enough in the ocean and then float in salt-water for decades until they are found.

> For something to stand the test of time, it has to be lost.

I agree. Some of the people quoted in the article advocated writing on a monumental scale in order to preserve it, but I don't think that gives particularly good odds of preservation. To add to the examples you cite, the Georgia Guidestones were pretty much a modern experiment in preservation through monumentalism; they painted a monumental target on their backs right away, and ultimately ended up being destroyed this year.

The way to go is probably massive replication in a compact, durable medium.

> Georgia Guidestones

I had never heard about this before. What an odd tale. It's a real-life story of people falling into FUD over something pretty innocuous.

Cue AWA, which is where GHACV is stored (IIUC on film, not aluminium though)

> For greater data density and integrity, most data was stored QR-encoded, and compressed. A human-readable index and guide found on every reel explains how to recover the data.The 02/02/2020 snapshot, consisting of 21TB of data, was archived to 186 reels of film by our archive partners Piql and then transported to the Arctic Code Vault, where it resides today.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

https://arcticworldarchive.org/

That is surprisingly close to some plot points of the Mistborn Trilogy from Brandon Sanderson: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn

Whenever I read something about leaving messages for future peoples, my mind drifts back to this Mistborn quote, "I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."

> I love the fictional idea that I have that some billionaire will create multiple underground caverns around the world in geologically stable places, each containing the knowledge of the world - engraved onto aluminum plates.

You mean the knowledge that said billionaire deems important, and/or makes them look good.

Ted Faro is the guy to speak to. He is into preserving the knowledge of generations for the enrichment of humanity.

There's a sci-fi book 'The Mote In God's Eye' that touches on this concept.

Spoiler Alert...

Humans discover an alien planet/race and eventually realize they've destroyed and rebuilt civilization many times. They've learned to build 'museums' for future civilizations to discover that house a roadmap to all of their advanced technology, but biological constraints (they have to reproduce or they die, ensuring extreme population pressure) mean that global war is basically inevitable. So they're stuck speed-running this cycle where they start from the stone age, rapidly rebuild an extremely advanced society based on guidance from the 'museums', experience extreme population growth, bomb themselves back into the stone age, rinse and repeat. There's a hope that if they can just push technology a little bit further each cycle, they might be able to reach a point where they can resolve the underlying issue, but it's unclear if that's a pipe dream.

Interesting take on the "pre-tech society discovers keys to future tech" trope. Does advanced technology actually solve all problems, or just it just let us skip ahead along the timeline to the same conclusion?

This reminds me of a method to develop time travel:

A thousand beautiful stone tablets are buried and sunk all around the world in multiple languages. The tablets announce the purpose of the experiment and share a series of dates and precise locations. In those places and times, a set of extremely sensitive sensors are set up to listen. If one is reasonably confident that the tablets will be discovered in a 1000 years, and if there is some unknown physics that enables sending information back in time, then a communication channel could be set up allowing the flow of future tech into the past. And worst case, we are left with a bunch of beautiful stone tablets for future generations to ponder over.

Non-alloy aluminum is too soft sapphire would be more durable ironically (?) it's a form of aluminum oxide.

Diamond would be even better. Maybe we are wearing the messages of an ancient civilization in the form of diamonds?

The problem with these materials is that they're worth something when cut up into pieces. Something that isn't true for clay.

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