France's ANDRA Developing a Million-Year Hard Drive

Wow. They are investing low capacity sapphire and platinum hard drives at $30,000 a piece based on worries that after humans are extinct, technology aged from the present time will experience a loss of magnetism or simply rot, making all our valuable insights lost to whatever is the next dominant life form.

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This is absurd on so many levels.

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How valuable is out insight if we fail as a species?

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How can we assure their feelers, flippers, claws or whatever will be able to manipulate the drive?

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What makes us confident we can communicate with an known future species? Why would they be inclined to grasp are particular flavor of abstraction?

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What if they are blind/deaf in spectrum we use?

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Why would we assume their timescale of what they perceive as a present moment will be closely enough aligned with ours to allow our signals to have a possibility of being noticed?

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Sapphire covered platinum disks.... there don't seem to be the same level of cutbacks in France.

If only our ancestors had been so inclined, we'd know all the wisdom of their age...You know like fire building, wheel making, why virgins make the best sacrifices... who knows what mysteries lie undiscovered still....dinosaur trapping?mummification? talking to animals? how to make why whites whiter still? Yes all these mysteries can be traced to lack of information preservation....or is it just lack of information?, well we'll never really know because the information has been lost, possibly....

So who collects on on the guarantee should the drive fail after only 500,000 years?

Because of the economic decay that France has got it'self into, then this money whould have been better spent elswhere, and what makes them believe that when humans die out, that the then dominant animals will be able to read what is written on these hard drives, and how will they know what to do with them..???

I can't imagine that any data storage medium could become obsolete and unreadable in say.. a million years.

Can't imagine that future civilizations would consider sapphire and platinum useful or valuable for anything other than data storage. No one would mistake it for an old ornament, or a valuable trinket to mark the tomb of a king where there's apt to be tons of treasure. Looooots of treasure in the sealed area down there...

So this is the upgrade on the AZTEC callendar that is apparently due to expire within the year.

It begs the question of whether it's art or pride. Some information that was "paramount" when I was studying EE is now so obscure that it's useless.

If they are able to interrogate the device, then they won't need to use a slide rule, they'll already understand electricity and other features.

Why don't they invent a geiger counter to last a million years that will provide warning to the unwary visitors instead. Imaging, the unwary visitors discover this burried archaeological find, excavate it and take this hard drive and the "artifacts" back to the lab and are all dead before they decipher what was written on the little spinning disk.

What language do they expect to still be possible in that time period? Egyptian inscriptions took a stroke of luck and that was only 3 to 5000 years ago.

Go, Geiger! That's exactly what's called for.

If they are much like us, it isn't hard to imagine; wishful thinking bending early interpretation (of messages we intended to communicate locations to avoid), as treasure maps.

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At that point all attempts we will have left to dissuade entry and deter excavation will only serve to reinforce the misunderstanding. I'm sure their version of Indiana Jones will have instilled the understanding that the degree of difficulty to gain entry is directly proportional to the value of the what is being protected....

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And if that does happen, our bleeding hearts will have reach out from beyond our ancient graves to once again cause great harm with all original intent and motivation derived from a desire to be the protector of vulnerable populations of nonspecific individuals unable to fend for themselves.

Bless their future little....probably heart-like, organs, lets do help them.