Storing Digital Data Forever

Be sure to store instructions on how to build a reader.

And if they're wrong, who's going to be around to sue them?

Forever is a long time...especially near the end....this no doubt will turn out to be as useless as cave painting is today.....ok ok except to anthropologists....

What does it say? The end is near....

Looks like a soup recipe.

We'd like to have you for dinner....

Clearly its assembly instructions for an Ikea kitchen cabinet set.

How else do you explain the missing limbs, multiple references to rope tourniquets and apparent references to using an assortment of birds as fasteners and or alignment dowels plus having to stand in positions that are physically impossible to make things fit?

Hire Egyptian stone masons to "carve" the "1's & 0's" data in granite...lasts a LONG time!

I think we should preserve all the pictures and let them make up their own explanations....The meaning of words and phrases change over time and leads to much confusion when translation is attempted....We could just say "caption this" under each picture....It could become a popular pastime in some future metropolis...

This is only a couple thousand years....

Imagine 10,000....

Ironically, carving into stone very likely will last longer. Storing data "forever" using some "high tech" method is useless if the ability to retrieve it is lost. We cannot assume that technology will forever continue to advance.

The information we have now would be even more valuable in a future where technology has been lost due to a man made (e.g. nuclear war) or natural disaster of global proportion.

Isn't that why we have Youtoob?

The data storage technique may provide extremely long life but how long will the storage media survive? It is glass after all which is vulnerable to mechanical as well as chemical and thermal damage.

Just take the laser and point the beam to a star or quasar that is 8 billion light years away. The data will still be retained in that light stream.There won't be any equipment that can read it but the data will still be there. In 5.4 billion years Sol will run out of hydrogen and expand to engulf the Earth. There will be no reader or useful data crystals left on Earth by this time.

I wonder if we included this message on the Voyager's golden platter....

This is the only record likely to survive of civilization on Earth....valuable collectors item....

what brings us to what kind of data is required = recipes , manufacturing methodology , explanatory dictionaries / encyclopedias (for complete dummies!!! - that you´ll be after 200y as seen from time.Now()) . . . the current conceptual postulates of physics.