Thank you so much for your efforts!
I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it.
Something that,
- is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion)
- requires no power
- doesn't require software to read/reboot from
- (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years
Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve these goals by miniaturizing pages and etching them on some metallic surface (a titanium alloy), depositing a layer of some resilient transparent material onto this surface, and creating multiple copies.
A few copies for Earth. 2 or 3 for the Moon. And a few sent out of the solar system on probes like Voyager.
Voyager itself is a great example of what we could achieve. The golden records were made out of stable, inert materials and Voyager’s trajectory doesn’t intersect with any known object for billions of years. The records themselves will be intact for at least two billion years according to one estimate. They are, for all intents and purposes, functionally immortal parcels of information.
https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...
Some simple math, if the pages could fit inside of a 10mm x 10mm square, then for a plate that's about the size of an average coffee table at 2' x 4', we could fit 7,432 pages.
Assuming that we have 50 billion pages, we'd need about 6.7 million such plates to fit all of human knowledge, so far.
It sounds crazy, but assuming we could get net costs per plate down to $500, each copy would be about $35M. Or, ~0.14% of an Uber. Alternatively, 0.002% of the F-35 program.
That's doable!
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6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.
Another problem is likely to be organization of the plates/copies. The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
(apologies for any typos, it's very late at my end)