2009/5/5 Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com>: > I'm splitting off a separate thread about long-term archiving. The > original thread is important enough not to derail it. > > This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many > different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation > has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta > Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts. > Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline, > robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy... > [ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :) > ] > > Kevin Kelly on long-term backups: > http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/ > The original y2k event: > http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/ > > Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up > good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent > price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the > [re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost > knowledge. > > You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words > of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel > sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this > laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in > price. > > SJ
High purity nickel would appear to run into the intrinsic value issue. The value of including thumbnails is complicated. On one hand it solves the translation issue since near 3 million will illustrated articles is unlikely to present a significant translation challenge to any moderately advanced civilization. On the other hand they take up more space than pure text. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
