This was not a mistake on Moromendas01's part. If it was, he's had over two months to fix it. He very clearly did it on purpose, to: a) post his spam sig, and b) cover this tracks. To cover his tracks, he plagiarized a previous post in the thread. For the entire body of his own post.

That would be the hardest part is the container. A coffee can would not suffice. If you were here at the beach nothing short of thick stainless steel would work with a triple seal.

Hi,

Moromendas01's has not participated since 3-15-11.

We are handling the situation(s). Thanks for the input.

Hi,
Agree that the container(s) type along with the interior conditioning would be a priority.

A matryoshka principle would work; That way each container would have a seal for condition of the contained information. The level of containers would depend on the type or importance of the time capsule.

After skimming the thread, it seems we are agreed that normal dvd/cd are the worst material - they degrade without even being used - as was confirmed by a french study - 10 years max, but normally, as most of us have experienced, considerbaly less.

Engraved material seems to be best - hey, you can still play the old phonographs and 78's. There is a huge variety of material available for engraving - clay has been mentioned and the most expensive, gold, is one of the metals most resistant to oxidation etc. - even though it is a somewhat soft metal.

The danger of putting all ones eggs in one basket has been pointed out - so copy, copy and distribute.

Engraved material means also, that unlike chemical (cd/dvd) and magnetic material, one could reproduce and transfer the information to low tech material. The chinese were the masters of this, as was Gutenberg - engraved stuff can be "printed", i.e transferred to short or longer term optical material for general use.

But CD's and DVD's were an irresponsible swindle and I really hope that nobody put their family photos on dvd's expecting them to last until their grand-cchildren grew up.

I have got rid of all my dvd's and am investing heavily in external disks. Magnetic material isn't perfect, I know I must copy them periodically. But I hope that someone will come up with a permanent form of storage in a Henry Ford format - i.e. affordable.

Vellum is pretty good. Its better than linen paper, which is much better than the pulp paper everyone uses now, and better than papyrus as well BTW, the only reason it lasts so long is local conditions. Still, its nowhere near as long lasting as clay tablets, and thats outclassed by stone. If you really want something to last for a long time, a very hard volcanic stone would be the way to go. Not that the other stone types are that bad either, plenty of 4000+ year old sedimentary stone structures (and engravings) are still around.

Electronics as we have them now wont even get close to stone.

What’s The Most Durable Way To Store Information?
1. Engrave it on a piece of platinum. 2. Bury the platinum in the desert.
By Daniel Engber November 26, 2013
Despite claims to the contrary, the storage media in wide use today—CD-ROMs, spinning hard drives, flash memory, etc.—aren’t very durable. “You’re talking years, not decades,” says Howard Besser, a professor and archivist at New York University who was named a pioneer of digital preservation by the Library of Congress. “A CD-ROM was originally supposed to last 100 years, but many fail in 10.”
Old-fashioned paper has done very well by comparison. Until people made a habit of adding acidic chemicals to their paper in the 19th century, books could last five hundred years or more. And while paper has its vulnerabilities—to fire and water, for example—so do more newfangled technologies. A hard disk, for instance, may suffer from a loss of mobility. “You’ve got to have it spinning regularly or you’re not going to be able to play it,” says Besser. “It’s kind of like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.”
At a 1998 conference, Besser and 12 others worked out a plan for the perfect long-term storage device: They would etch images into platinum with a laser and bury the platinum in the desert. “Ideally, we would put a nuclear-waste facility next to it,” Besser adds, “so people will never forget where it is.”
But even the most indestructible data storage won’t be of any use if no one can decode the contents. Archivists also need to preserve the languages or programs used to save information, whether that’s ancient Greek or Word for Windows 95. Besser and his colleagues worry that this decoding issue will be the real bottleneck. “The durability of something is a far smaller problem than the other problems that we have,” he says.

@yooy
usb stick? Is any type of usb likely to be used in twenty years or so? New interfaces for data transfer are developing all the time so you're back in the "let's store it on floppy disk, safe as houses" area. Ah!... but then computer manufacturers decide to do away with the old floppy technology because newer and smarter stuff - usb has been developed. Hmmm... rinse and repeat.

Sata drives? Again will you have something to read them in twenty years or will they have gone the same route?

Tape:? You're having a giraffe aren't you!
Tape degrades if it's not kept at the right temperature and humidity but the main problem would be that if you'd saved all your data on one type of tape; DLT, SDLT, Exabyte Mammoth,DDS-1,2,3,4, DAT, LTO, I even remember the old Qic tapes used way back in Sun 68000 systems! How on earth are you going to recover the data? OK, there are companies making a good living from recovering data from ancient tapes which have gone the way of papyrus scrolls but media obsolescence is a big problem.

@choogendyk

Possibly the way it would have to go; data encoded holographically within a crystal matrix. I think this has been done though not commercially, and if you have the misfortune to break the crystal matrix... each shard contains the data in its entirety. All you need to do is write some instructions on how to recover the data in a language that any alien who finds it can decode.

What? You think we humans will be the ones to open the box with with the World in the mess it's in today?
Anyone wonder why hydraMax is asking the question in the first place?

Play Bonny!



Oops! Maybe I should read the WHOLE thread in future!

Good grief! I'm now partly responsible for resurrecting a 2011 zombie thread.!

Apologies to all. (I REALLY, REALLY must read the Whole thread, including when it originated.)

Off to stand in the corner now...

Play Bonny!