Collectively, we have a long-term memory problem. Paper turns to mulch, dyes in optical disks degrade, iron oxides don’t last forever, and flash memories will eventually fade away. So what do you do when you want to write something down and make sure it’s around a couple of thousand years from now? Easy — just use something that even Mother Nature herself has trouble breaking down: plastic.
Specifically, fluoropolymer fishing line, which is what [Nikolay Valentinovich Repnitskiy ] uses as a medium in his “Carbon Record” project. There’s not a lot of information in the repository, but the basic idea is to encode characters by nicking the fishing line along its length. The encoder is simple enough; a spool of fresh line is fed into a machine where a solenoid drives a sharpened bolt against the filament. This leaves a series of nicks that encode the ones and zeros of 255 ASCII characters. It looks like [Nikolay ] went through a couple of prototypes before settling on the solenoid; an earlier version used a brushed motor to drive the encoder, but the short, rapid movements proved too much for the motor to handle. We’ve included a video below that shows the device encoding some text; sounds a little like Morse to us. Ssi Encoder
There seems to be a lot more going on with this device than the repo lets on; we’d love to know what the big heat sink on top is doing, for instance. Hopefully we’ll get more details, including how [Nikolay] intends to decode the dents. Or perhaps that’s an exercise best left to whoever finds these messages a few millennia hence.
mmmm….. plastic molecules don’t break down for thousands of years but that doesn’t mean that plastic objects don’t. They embrittle and turn into little pieces of microplasitcs that no longer carry your information.
Embed it in fruitcake. It will last til the next epoch.
Leave the fruitcake inside a Toyota Tacoma. It will be immortal.
Wrap fruitcake (holding the fishing line) in a baguette. This is then bricked into a Lattice of oatmeal raisin cookies using marshmallow and honey frosting to hold it all together. Guaranteed to last millennia or your money back. Offer void if manipulative force of 142mp is used to laterally bisect the cookie assembly.
So in a few years can back up my computer on to candy corn? Finally, a use for candy corn! We’re saved!!
Clay tablets. Cuneiform. It was already invented and time tested.
Yes. Just what I was thinking. What if future life doesn’t speak English. Or any other languages we use today? Something easy to decode.
There are lots of computers from the 60s, 70s and 80s still around but there is no way to access the information on them. So not only is the information obsolete but so is the interface.
Since we apparently live in a computer simulation which is time looped (Groundhog etc.), seems to me the cuneiform is likely an effort to decode some funny string the Sumerians found a few thousand years from now (ago).
Must write X-Men comics in cuniform for the next round…..
I’ve given a lot of thought into leavning a message that will last thousands of years and after very little thought I realize chiseled stone seems to last thousands of years. It may erode under certain conditions, if you use limestone water will dissolve it away. As long as you use something like granite or even clay, as mentioned, it should last at least 10kya.
It seems he overthought this problem a bit.
Sorry, but this is a very weak idea. Plastics definitely do break down into pieces … just not at the molecular level. I fished for years with monofilament line and I can say with great certainty that it gets brittle and breaks into pieces even just sitting on a shelf. Nicked monofilament is even worse! Impressions on copper or stainless steel would make more sense and just as easy. I also don’t see the point of using all 255 ASCII characters … even Morse Code would be more efficient at saying something, but I’m sure there are even better schemes.
But you can compress and use uuencode, and also add checksums etc.
Maybe PTFE would be less prone to embrittlement?
I’m sorry but I can’t agree. It is important to be able to use tabs instead of spaces, and why wouldn’t you null terminate your plastic string?!?
See CarbonRecord.cpp lines 111 and 193, they are a ‘1’ bit as header and footer. Such note is also written at the beginning of the cpp. Tabs, null, and any byte of 8 bits, is written directly to the fishing line verbatim, as input from the file you provide.
I’d prepend a header ‘1’ bit per file bit or nibble–for write-integrity. Maybe I’ll add this as an option in the next version, perhaps even change the media to copper wire. Additionally, you may compress your file beforehand, using .tar.bz2 for maximum down-sizing.
But this is my fault; I include these juicy details at the top of the cpp itself. I’ll copy these details to the readmes from now on.
In a foreseeable future there will be lots of second hand 30X stainless steel low poly shaped sheets on the market. That might be a good stuff to groove information into.
For the encoding we could use a well known Reed-Solomon code.
I agree with using Morse code to store text, but not binary data. Morse code is a sort of Huffman coding which can be considered as a compression algorithm since more frequent characters use less “encoding bits” (which means that it will give good results only for texts, not binary data).
But morse code isn’t futuristic and sexy enough. Otherwise he could have scratched morse code in a clay tablet for a better result. You can’t get micrometer resolution on clay, but at least it won’t fall apart just sitting there for a year or two like monofilament fishing line.
Sounds like you were using nylon monofilament. PVDF monofilament is extraordinarily stable and non-reactive.
Isn’t this a remake of the old, 1940s, wire recorders?
Make it double-stranded and use amino acids instead of fluoropolymer, it will last longer and have far superior data density. Also the read-write-copy mechanisms are incredibly tiny and cheap.
This is a sexy idea.
Please tell me more, show me the way on how to harness the aminos, got ref?
Well since everyone says fishing line will break down what about doing the same thing on copper wire?
Oh like a wire recorder of the early 1900s but not using magnetics.
If you are going to use marks, go with international morse code. It’s much less likely to be “forgotten, lost, and non-reconstruct-able” 4000 years from now when people are digging up landfills.
Chisel the instructions for decoding in granite?
Given the plethora of texts we have from the first and second century, and plenty of older ones, I’m not sure we have a problem? A quick walk through the British museum suggests that recording data for thousands of years is a problem which was solved… thousands of years ago.
But some of those texts are fragments of papyrii, others are rolled up sheets of corroded ink, at least a number of clay tablets have shown an even longer durability.
Based on the state of some old fishing gear in my garage, I will confirm that after about 20 years fishing line degrades into a somewhat stuck together lump which can not be unspooled.
Nothing beats paper for storing information
Actually, a lot of things do.
Not really. Paper beats rock, but only scissors beat paper.
WE SHOULD RECORD THINGS ON SCISSORS!
What if… hear me out here… we store the information on all Paper, scissors *and* rock. As long as enough of any of them survive you can use the other parallel copies as a sort of non-hdd based raid array :D
Lithograph it onto silicon and coat it with amber resin, should be good for 320 million years.
This is the way. OP’s method is simple and easy to democratize, but very little beats binary data etched into a high hardness material that is then protected from exposure by resin.
The issue with that is that Amber, like other polymers (such as the fishing line), is in a non-equilibrium state and is mechanically aging at room temperature. These are viscoelastic materials and are trying to flow over long timescales. Also as they age, they densify by reducing their volume. It’s unclear what the result of very small, presumably micron sized etchings on the amber or on the SS would be with the mechanical deformation over time. Is likely you wouldn’t be able to remove the amber from the SS and you would likely have major issues with funny refractions in the amber if you try to read through it at that scale, especially after it has evolved for so long.
The issue with that is that Amber, like other polymers (such as the fishing line), is in a non-equilibrium state and is mechanically aging at room temperature. These are viscoelastic materials and are trying to flow over long timescales. Also as they age, they densify by reducing their volume. It’s unclear what the result of very small, presumably micron sized etchings on the amber or on the Si would be with the mechanical deformation over time. Is likely you wouldn’t be able to remove the amber from the Si and you would likely have major issues with funny refractions in the amber if you try to read through it at that scale, especially after it has evolved for so long.
Recording straight bits is a bad idea. You don’t know what to feed the line through the decoder so can easily lose synchronization. You need a line code. If you’re going for long term decodability something simple like a Manchester code is probably the way to do that. Basically have regular marks for the clock and have a mark or not in between depending on whether the bit is set.
A technique like this is used with stainless steel wire (marked by laser) to make tags for salmon hatchlings. They are injected into a safe place in the salmon’s head with a code indicating the hatchery. When salmon boats unload a catch, the heads are fed through a metal detector and the tags recovered.
I don’t agree with using pure ASCII or Morse code.
UTF8 is the way to go when you carve stones and write on parchments.
Why not just use DNA? Record your data in DNA and use CRISPR to inject it into a Virus, that writes said data into a few billion people. But be nice and only kill a million or so.
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