Man, Was I wrong,,,,

and I am so VERY happy to make that admission.

Yesterdays post, I made the argument that there should be some effort to record our records, history, sciences, language, etc etc in some permanent form or factor. I had heard NOTHING about such a project.

So I aske Claude the simple question “is there anyone doing such a project in the world at large?” (I had copied and pasted the excerpt of that portion to illustrate my thoughts.)

30 seconds. It took all of thirty seconds for Claude to come back with a DETAILED list of 5 different projects in active pursuit of that very thing. From storing the information on the moon (no atmosphere to degrade materials, only real risk is asteroid strikes,, kinda sorta hard to access though.) to something so Sci-fi as to make my Mind bend in on itself.

Here is the short list with addresses, and I’ll dip into each one quicklike.

Memory of Mankind — memoryofmankind.at
Arctic World Archive — arcticworldarchive.org
5D Memory Crystal — 5dmemorycrystal.com
Microsoft Project Silica — microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica
Arch Mission Foundation — archmission.org

Memory of Mankind is ‘printing’ archives into ceramics and storing the product in an abandoned salt mine in Austria. Any one can submit information that they feel is relevant (follow that addy) This one is philospophically aligned with what I was addressing, but has an issue. More on that at the end.

Arctic World Archive:They use piqlFilm, a hybrid digital-analog medium engineered to last over 2,000 years under ideal conditions, stored deep in a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard. Access limited by format IMO. Again, more on that towards the end.

5D memory Crystal: This one is right up there with many of my sci-fi reads,,, the one that made my jaw hit floor. “University of Southampton researchers developed a method of storing data in fused quartz glass using femtosecond lasers. They’ve already stored the Holy Bible, the Magna Carta, and the human genome on it. (Wikipedia) A single glass disc roughly the size of a traditional optical platter can hold up to 360 terabytes. The estimated lifespan under normal conditions: 13.8 billion years” Reading these crystals might be a bit of a problem if you don’t have the hardware or software to decode the info. Great application, but misses the target of “lost civilization memory”.

And of course MS has to get their digits into it too. I will say, they have more money and time, they might come up with a solution that works, but its going to come with a price, like anything MS does. Kind of misses the point of keeping us alive, at least as a knowledge base IMO.

The Arch Mission Foundation sits alongside Project Silica here — solid intent, credible tech, but access gated behind more tech. Same problem as the Golden Record: a stunning concept undone by the fact that the instructions for building a record player are on the record. Oops. Maybe they shoulda drawn the diagram on the “back cover” and hoped someone could make heads or tails of the draft.
That problem compounds when the tech requires not just a reader, but a decoder program on top of it. Which is why Memory of Mankind rings my bell. Anyone with basic optics can read the ceramic tablets. They even made a “Rosetta Stone” tablet to bridge language drift.
The downside there is different — it’s not access, it’s recognition. Big assumptions get made about who finds it. Look at the Nag Hammadi library: found by a child sent to gather burnable material to keep the home fire going and dinner cooking. No one knows how much was lost to “mama makin’ dinner” before that survived. The same risk applies to any physical archive — some ‘bright boi’ finds a ceramic plate that chips out nicely into an arrowhead, and destroys information that’s gone for good. Or the “pretty crystals” end up as baubles, traded to get laid or impress a rival, with zero idea what they’re holding.

And the ultimate answer?

All three. Current dead tree storage over digital representation for the short term (100 years or so. There are modern parchments that are, supposedly, capable of several hundred years or more. Use those.) Ceramics for the longer term, along with the information to build and access the crystals, with the crystals holding the lions share of it all. (smaller format, denser information clusters,) And should be stored in redundant ways: Multiple locations of identical information. (and yes, even on the frellin’ moon ‘just because!’.) Maybe even layered ‘security’ of some sort to keep things accessible only with understanding of the prior level. yah,,, that one’s WAY above my paygrade,,,,

I’ve said, “we live on the shoulders of Giants’, and it’s not my idea, but borrowed from other great thinkers. Its a TRUTH even so. The real problem; there were Giants before those we know by name: they left evidence scattered across the Globe, and we know next to nothing about them, and the more we learn, the less the ‘accepted story’ makes sense. And we see active cover-up in some cases, especially around the Pyramids of Giza. Or denied access to further investigations, such as what is happening at Gobleki Tepe AND the Pyramids.

I would hope these projects listed alleviate the mystery when we are all so much dust and whispers on the wind.

My mortality is a given: a point I came to understand many moons ago. I don’t fear my own death. I DO fear the death of a species such as ours: more specifically, the knowledge we hold dear, which is what makes us what we are. So many lost in the void of time, and I would like to see us not follow that same course.

Love y’all

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(, ‘)