
Memory of Mankind: All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine - randomerr
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human-knowledge-salt-mine/512552/?single_page=true
======
ekidd
The largest preservation effort along these lines—though not using ceramics—is
probably the Internet Archive, which seals physcial materials into shipping
containers. Some examples:

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-
archi...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-
books-brewster-kahle)

[http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-
int...](http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-internet-
archive-continues-inform-serve-inspire/)

This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to
transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially)
or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the
hair of mummies for thousands of years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy)

~~~
Cyph0n
> In 1974 Egyptologists visiting his tomb noticed that the mummy's condition
> was rapidly deteriorating and flew it to Paris for examination. Ramesses II
> was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as "King
> (deceased)".

Humanity is simply amazing... we have come so far. A king who died ~3500 years
ago was flown thousands of kilometers on a plane and was issued his own
passport!

> bury them in the North African desert

How viable do you think would it be to setup a business that provides storage
space and tracking capability in the Tunisian desert? I'm from Tunisia btw,
and I think government seed funds would be happy to fund something like that.
The biggest issue is who would actually pay for a service like that?

~~~
ekidd
One big question in the minds of many customers might be political stability.
Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct? Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't
been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two
world wars.

There's definitely a commericial market for storing paper documents for
decades, maybe up to a century. This is currently addressed by existing mine-
based storage companies, among other things. Plus mines are secure: There's
often only one way in and the storage is surrounded by rock.

Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for
millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something.

~~~
Cyph0n
> One big question in the minds of many customers might be political
> stability. Tunisia had a revolution in 2011, correct?

Correct, but the transition was from an autocracy to a fledgling democracy;
the opposite would be more concerning. Security and infrastructure are both
improving. Foreign investments are on the rise.

This is the absolute best time to be setting up a foreign business in Tunisia,
since the government will basically pay you money to do so. Oh, and skilled
labor is _extremely_ cheap and the currency is at a low right now. The only
issue is that English is a 3rd language - French is more common - but
Tunisians are starting to adopt English more as it opens more doors,
especially on the internet.

> Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite
> being literally in the middle of two world wars.

Great, but the labor costs and bureaucratic overhead alone would be
prohibitively high - 500 years of stability doesn't come for free! Another
issue for such a business specifically is that Switzerland is landlocked.
Tunisia's access to the sea is excellent, and it has a number of ports spread
from north to south (the beaches are amazing btw!). Tunisia is also very close
to Europe, and is the northernmost country in Africa.

The advantage Tunisia has over its North African neighbors (Morocco, Algeria,
and Libya) is that sea access is better, and getting to the desert is easier
as Tunisia is smaller in size.

~~~
ComputerGuru
> Correct, but the transition was from an autocracy to a fledgling democracy;
> the opposite would be more concerning.

Alas, Egypt just recently went from a (fledgling) democracy under Morsi to a
military autocracy under Sisi.

~~~
Cyph0n
Yes, and I'm still not over that to be honest. We were in it together, but
foreign interests didn't seem to align with the will of the Egyptian people.

Egypt is a regional power, so they wouldn't let it off as easily. Plus, I
recall that Morsi made some questionable decisions throughout his (short) term
as president.

I wish my Egyptian brothers and sisters the best.

------
13of40
Besides making the information last 10,000 years, I think another challenge is
coming up with a way of indexing that much data so that you can meaningfully
search through it without a computer. Something like a combination of a
concordance and a card catalog, with some kind of redundancy built. Another
interesting thing to ponder is whether you could structure it so there are
basic pieces of knowledge, like guidance for developing computing, so they can
index the rest of the thing and search it programmatically. I reckon we might
be too far removed from our roots to do a good job at that, though...

------
Spooky23
This guy is on point. This era will be a black hole in history.

I've worked in projects with archivists in a few US government entities
--there's hardly anything for more recent administrations. Between easy
deletion/loss of data and the difficulty of maintaining access to file formats
over time, lots of stuff will vanish.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>This era will be a black hole in history.

What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information
keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette
tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get
here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with
this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls
here.

I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between
fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind
as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding
doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.

That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to
papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more
convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old
as civilization itself.

~~~
Arizhel
>I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but
between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for
humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're
riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it
then.

That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're
simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a
few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our
civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon
the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what
things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting
archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on
interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Does humanity care about letting aliens know we once lived here long after we
are gone? I doubt it. Without that political will, this expensive space
graffiti will never happen.

~~~
Arizhel
Does "humanity"? I don't know. There's no way to know that without a poll.

Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really
nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had
left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we
could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece
together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've
managed to dig up.

Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political
will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to
destruction of our civilization.

And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from
wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".

------
Animats
There was a US project in the 1950s, as part of Civil Defense, to put all the
information needed to rebuild industrial society on microfiche. Copies, along
with microfiche viewers that worked in sunlight, without power, were put in
major fallout shelters.

Try to find one of those today.

~~~
6stringmerc
A University I attended had fallout shelters in at least one of its major
campus libraries (also a National Archive IIRC). Might not be 'on the shelf'
so to speak but I bet they might still have a copy.

------
Udo
I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in
history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling
information in so it can only be used (ephemerally and in exchange for money)
but not usefully retrieved and replicated elsewhere. It's "death by cloud".

The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates
this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on
being able to make many copies and modifications, too.

People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when
clearly the knowledge was _almost_ there. My pet theory about this involves
walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the
library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be
truly accessible to a huge group of people.

Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant
deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date
offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites.
In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important
innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like
almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing
their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their
data.

If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few
megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising
way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at
least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your
services as possible. Don't _just_ use Spotify, have music on your hard drive.
Don't _just_ use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all
your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive.

I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year
I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life,
hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single
drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as
my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did
this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as
the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending
supervolcano eruption.

------
Johnny555
_Kunze plans to distribute ceramic tokens around the world to everyone who
either funds, contributes to, or advises on the project. Every 50 years,
starting in 2070, he says, holders will meet to keep the memory of the capsule
alive and to discuss if it needs to be reopened_

The problem with this is that if there are enough people around that remember
about this and have the spare time and means to go there an dig an opening
again, then it's probably not needed because society still exists.

If a some global catastrophe happens that wipes out much of our our modern
records and knowledge, then "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain
in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's
preserved through oral lore.

~~~
josephagoss
> "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is
> going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral
> lore.

I think that knowledge would become the new gold/buried treasure in such a
world. They who have the knowledge wins, and it will become potentially far
more valuable than any stash of Gold.

If that is true for such a post apocalyptic future, then the lore of the
buried treasure in the salt mine will probably spread and many will seek it
out.

------
freddy5
Or you know, launch it into geostationary orbit or medium earth orbit[0].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAGEOS#Time_capsule)

~~~
ablation
I was mulling on something similar the other day, except I was thinking that
it might be sent to a Lagrange point. Might be more stable/less in harms way?

------
hanoz
Notwithstanding it hasn't been a great few years for only destroyable by
hammer artefacts.

------
dTal
"All of human knowledge"? Let's think about maybe trying to collect that in
the first place, before we worry about preservation. A vast amount of
_essential_ knowledge is locked away in oral traditions, expensive textbooks,
and proprietary company processes. This is why I hate the meme that the the
internet gives you access to "all of human knowledge" \- it would be
unimaginably, profoundly world-changing if it really did.

"Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a
civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up
to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first
principles to turn of the 20th century technology level." \--yourapostasy [HN
user]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828)

------
felipemnoa
I wonder if instead we could encode this information in a metal that does not
corrode, like gold. Unfortunately gold is also a precious metal. Silver or
copper are good candidates too. The transcription of data could be done with a
laser in microprint. The data could also be encoded similar to how we encode
dvds but instead of just etching a tiny mark a partial hole could be punched
half way through for every ON bit. This way the data would be less susceptible
to scratches. Make the disc 1 centimeter thick and the holes .5 centimeters
deep. This way it would take a lot to destroy the data. A simple scratch would
not do it. Anybody with a microscope and the knowledge of binary would be able
to decode this. The instructions could be printed on the other side in
microprint That could be read with a microscope.

Books and scientific journals could be the first to be encoded. Reputable
newspapers could be next. Maybe the entire library of congress. Social media
data can be encoded dead last or not at all since it would not help in
rebuilding a civilization. We do not need to encode every tweet.

~~~
mitchtbaum
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

~~~
felipemnoa
Cool! Didn't know about this. This is definitely a start.

------
javajosh
Information is a linear ordering of shifting states. The most information
dense substrate I can think of would be irregularities in a (perfect) crystal
lattice, plus a convention regarding what path your scanner takes through that
lattice.

The problem is that future thinkers need to know it exists, and where to
start. Both problems can be solved with a larger, more obvious medium. And in
fact, you could have several mediums at different scales between big,
billboard sized stuff and the ultimate substrate, and each level describes
what you need to do to access the next level down. The billboard(100m) points
out the library (1m) describes how to read the microfiche (1mm) describes how
to build the TEM (1nm) which you use to read everything else.

Of course, that might very well be far too much information. Certainly most of
it will be useless to most observers - just like it is today. Well, we could
do worse than just storing Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg, and YouTube. But I
digress.

------
bprasanna
Good to see an effort in a right direction. Though i feel like boasting about
my post, this post [https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-
security/](https://bprasanna.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/hard-security/) was
written 8 years back!!!

------
edem
I've been to Hallstatt this summer. If you have time I recommend visiting the
place. Next to it there is Königsee which is a UNESCO heritage site. Königsee
itself is a tarn and you can literally drink from it. For this reason they
only use electric and row boats to traverse the lake. I can't imagine a more
suitable location for this burial despite the fact that the place is
overlooked by Obersalzberg (Hitler's Eagle Nest).

------
f_allwein
makes you wonder what future generations/ alien visitors will think of us when
they discover it. I bet they'd be amazed/ puzzled.

~~~
SonicSoul
they'll most likely see us as primitive. but they will be grateful for the
pain we endured to let humanity continue to the next evolutionary step. Sort
of like how we look at Neanderthals today.

------
kazagistar
In the excellent fictional work(s) of Humanity Has Declined, a failing and
dwindling human race fritters away arguing over how to best implement a Human
Monument to all their knowledge and achievements, rather then spending the
resources to try to turn around the decline of civilization.

------
chiph
While encoding this onto 1mm ceramic sheets is impressive, if it is to survive
a fall of civilization, it needs to be immediately obvious that it has
readable and useful text and not depend on a 10x magnifying glass. So they
probably ought to be Sumerian tablet-sized.

------
ta7000
what would be the most durable material to laser-engrave instead of clay?

~~~
VLM
Solid gold bars. That or top quality stainless steel bars properly passivated
and polished. The correct question is what material is near worthless and not
usable as a construction brick that is none the less durable and laser
engravable. Its going to be hard to beat clay bricks.

------
hashberry
This is global doomsday level thinking. Reminds me of Y2K.

And using clay? This seems very sentimental. Are there not more long-lasting
mediums? Especially with laser printing where we can quickly engrave knowledge
without the risk of human error or time-consuming manual labor.

~~~
woliveirajr
> Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it’s emboldened by
> fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from
> earlier than 3000 B.C.E.

Ceramic is very stable during time. All modern media that you might think (LP?
tapes? Optical disks?) require some special instrument to recover the
information, other than simply looking at it (perhaps using some microscope).

Paper degrades. Plastic degrades, in general. Metals rust. But stones and
ceramics tend to be very durable, including against microorganisms and
chemicals. They just don't withstand mechanical forces, like a hammer. But
anyone willing to use a hammer would use any other thing to destroy other
medias, too.

~~~
marcosdumay
Ceramic is too general a term. Clay in particular reacts very badly to fire
and moderately badly to water (what matters for long time storage). Very few
Sumerian tablets are still around, and most of them partially destructed.

There are many better kinds of ceramic available, even glass would be a better
choice.

~~~
woliveirajr
Yes, I wasn't taking "clay" by its literal term from the news, but thinking
that being a ceramicist he would know how to make ceramics that last longer.

