
The world’s knowledge is being buried in a salt mine - smacktoward
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledge-is-being-buried-in-a-salt-mine
======
chias
Perhaps we should form an organization of a few thousand people and dedicate
it to safeguarding this location, making sure it never falls prey to local
politics and other unpleasantness during the temporary fall of what we
currently consider civilized culture. This foundation would need a descriptive
name, and could probably use a plucky mayor to get things done. And we should
set up a second one about a thousand miles off the coast of New Zealand.

If my calculations are correct, this should reduce the length of this neo-
dark-age from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.

~~~
maverick_iceman
The foundation should aggregate all of human knowledge in one giant
encyclopedia, which should be of help even when mankind venture to the
galaxies after the dark age.

~~~
user5994461
You're talking about the plot from the foundations series of books, by Isac
Asimov. Where's the line between sci-fi and reality.

One foundation will keep all of human knowledge, while the universe goes at
war for 1000 years straight.

Spoiler Alert: A second foundation, secret and hidden even from the first one,
will keep all of human knowledge as well and protect the first one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series)

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pmoriarty
It would be great if similar archives were distributed in salt mines around
the world. Having a single point of failure in Austria does not sound very
robust.

They should also sell those tokens as a means of generating revenue. I'd buy
some and hand them down.

The article also talks about the possibility of civilizations losing the
ability to read in three generations, but there's no mention of a plan to deal
with that. These archives would be mostly useless to an illiterate society,
except maybe as objects of wonder or worship.

That would be an interesting challenge, actually -- how could you teach an
illiterate, collapsed civilization to read if they don't have access to
electronic gadgets like audio players, computers, monitors, or projectors?

My first thought is to have some audio on wax cylinders with hand-cranked
players or something. But then there's no guarantee that the hearers will even
speak the language. Assuming the language is similar enough, though, it would
still be challenging to teach someone to read merely by such primitive audio
recordings. They'd have to be paired with some visual aids, and the people
listening would have to be really motivated to learn.

~~~
X86BSD
It's probably more true that you realize. Salt mines across many countries are
being used to store all sorts of knowledge.

For instance here in Kansas is a huge salt mine that Hollywood uses to store
original prints of many many classic films and works.

In Kansas City Missouri is one of the largest underground limestone cavern
converted to storage for all forms of records. From film to paper archives for
government.

I imagine it's more coming than we think because it's not sexy and these types
of facilities do not get much press.

~~~
Houshalter
That's great, although that's a long shot from this project. Ideally a project
like this should contain much of humanity's knowledge and history, include
multiple languages, and be in a form that can last thousands of years. And
then mark it's location somehow so people in the future can find it.

------
SamBam
One of the biggest problems with putting all this in a single location is
that, no matter how secure the location is from the elements, it is not secure
to people (or else it would be useless).

Given the length of time imagined, I think the odds that the place is
accessible by individuals or groups who believe they should destroy the data
approaches 100%.

See the deliberate destruction of ancient sites all across the Middle East.
See the sacking of Rome by the Vandals, the *goths, and the Normans. See the
destruction of the Library of Alexandria. See the rise in religious extremists
who seem specifically to hate artifacts belonging to other cultures on their
soil.

How does a physical repository of human knowledge defend itself against this?

~~~
foob
I personally agree with you but this is how they attempt to address that point
on their website:

> The token shows the location in such a way that a future civilization will
> be able to interpret its correct meaning. This will require a technical and
> scientific understanding which is comparable to our own. This is the
> guarantee that the archive is suitably protected from premature access. Only
> a civilization which fulfils these requirements will be able to find the
> archive as well as being able to process, decipher and comprehend its
> content. The depiction on the token: Two intersecting lines span a map of
> Europe.

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Cozumel
Now 'what if' the worlds knowledge had already been buried ages ago by a long
gone civilisation, they had the same idea as us to use 'ceramic microfilm'.
For your consideration I present the Dropa Stones (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones)
)

Maybe fake but still food for thought.

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makomk
Just so long as distant future generations don't confuse this with the salt
mine containing America's nuclear waste...

~~~
TeMPOraL
"Be wary, wanderer. One of those caves contains the lost knowledge of the
ancient civilization that came before us. The other will kill you in a slow,
painful way. Are you up to the challenge?"

~~~
madaxe_again
At least we didn't decide to _really_ test our descendants and use the same
mine for both!

------
che_shirecat
Is there a chance that knowledge of entire languages are lost to
catastrophe/time? What use are tablets in English, French, German, etc. if no
one can decipher them?

~~~
paganel
There's certainly a chance that that will happen, yes. We don't need a
catastrophe for that, just different socio-economic conditions that don't
favor reading, writing and doing intellectual things, generally speaking.

On top of that languages like English, French and German are pretty "new", so
to speak, I mean they're not older than 1000 years, at the most. I'm pretty
sure most native English speakers need a "modernized" version of Chaucer's
works (meaning a translation) in order to understand what he wanted to say,
and the same goes for the French and Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel".
2,000 years ago no-one on this continent (Europe) was speaking neither French,
nor English, nor German, so it's plausible that in another 2,000 years these
languages will have changed to the point of becoming new ones.

~~~
dom0
OTOH we have little problem understand latin or greek texts.

~~~
throwaway1892
OTOH The number of people capable of understanding latin or greek is rather
small.

Language can go extinct in a way that nobody can learn them anymore

~~~
dom0
There is nothing keeping more people from learning it, though; as soon as a
few people have learned it, the knowledge about a language can be proliferated
to others. It's just that we generally don't care a lot (beyond employing a
few thousand(?) people world-wide per language) for ancient texts.

------
dghughes
Why not sapphire instead of stone? I guess it's stone they don't go into much
detail about the medium used even on their website and the two videos
explaining the project.

A company called Fahrenheit 2451 makes sapphire disk that can withstand high
temperatures and supposedly lasts one million years.

Fahrenheit 2451 is still tying to get funding but they seem to be able to
make/grow the disks already.

~~~
extrapickles
They probably picked stone for its low intrinsic value as otherwise there
would be an incentive to plunder it. This is a fairly important consideration
for something that needs to last long term.

~~~
dghughes
True but maybe there is more of a chance the disk and information on it will
be found if it is valuable. A rock may be ignored because it's so common.

All we want is for the information to be read by someone after that it doesn't
matter what happens to the thing it's written on.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> maybe there is more of a chance the disk and information on it will be found
> if it is valuable. A rock may be ignored because it's so common

Well, a modern first-worlder wouldn't ignore a rock covered in writing, but
peasants overwhelmingly do just that.

If you want durability, stone isn't a good choice either; poor communities
repurpose worked stone into the things they want, because breaking up a big
wall somebody else put up a long time ago is much easier than quarrying your
own new stone and hauling it back to town. Tungsten would probably be a good
choice -- a primitive society would be unable to melt it.

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agentgt
I'm sure it is massively more expensive but why not put some probes on the
moon and have those probes syndicate.

Maybe have a couple of those probes become read only after a couple of
centuries (to avoid a hack/attack of overwriting and blowing away all data).

The moon has very few impacts with asteroids and very little geo activity.

~~~
Retric
Space is really harsh on electronic storage making long term storage
impractical. Sending hard copies like those shown is ridiculously expensive,
roughly replace everything you want to send to the moon with solid gold for a
cost estimate.

~~~
agentgt
Yes I'm sure the tech is not there yet and I'm not saying make a hard copy and
send it to space.... but how far are we off? Hundreds of years or decades? Is
there an iterative process... perhaps satellites at first (since landing is
generally complicated).

I guess it also depends on what you want to store and what you use to store.
There are crystals that could store data for pretty much eternity [1].

The problem with shoving stuff in a hidden salt mine is that no one (ie
aliens, future people etc) will know where it is where as on the moon or
satellite you can effectively have a much more salient sign of here is the
data (ie what is worse the data is destroyed or the data is never found?).

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/technology/5d-data-
storage-m...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/technology/5d-data-storage-
memory-crystals/)

~~~
gambiting
The problem with the moon is that it's being constantly bombarded by small
rocks - anything you place on the surface will be eventually hit. So you want
to bury things - and that's a completely different scope of problem than just
landing things on the moon.

------
mioelnir
Reminds me of Germany's archive mine
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_a...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive)

The english article is not very extensive, but on the german one you'll see at
least a few pictures of the storage
[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen)

------
squozzer
Now we can only hope that we don't forget where we put all that knowledge. I'm
still looking for a pair of scissors I kept "someplace safe."

~~~
waiseristy
4325's Salzkammergut Cave Scrolls

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nindalf
I'd be very interested to know what the impact of a severe solar storm would
be. The article appeared a little vague on this point.

~~~
smacktoward
The British government report it links to
([https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/449593/BIS-15-457-space-
weather-preparedness-strategy.pdf)) is less so:

 _The ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ for severe space weather is based on
the Carrington event of 1859, aligned to our current understanding of the
vulnerability of modern technologies... Research suggests that a reoccurrence
of the Carrington Event has a 1% annual probability..._

 _It is anticipated that the impacts would be:_

 _\- localised power outages;_

 _\- disruption of satellite operations, including to Global Navigation
Satellite System outages (GPS) and SATCOM disturbances;_

 _\- disruption to High Frequency communications;_

 _\- increased radiation to aircrew and passengers in flight, particularly
over polar regions; and_

 _\- further disturbances to small-part electronic systems._

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sosuke
If you like this I'd recommend checking out the "The Invisible Photograph"
series, part 1 features the underground Corbis Image Vault.
[http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto/posts/2](http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto/posts/2)

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7373737373
In the event of a total nuclear war, wouldn't it be imperative for all sides
to destroy all cultural and scientific artifacts of their opponents?

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AdamN
Is anybody selling those tokens?

