> The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.
This is a short-sighted view. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the internet has disappeared, and a bunch of spotty bits of that disappeared history are sitting on a single disk somewhere. A huge amount of that information could be interesting and useful to someone for some reason, and it is almost lost now.
Surprised that these are only "1.5x to 3x" the price of regular blurays. Just a tiny bit lower and we could abandon regular blurays themselves, and stop using hard drives for static backups. Making these a standard could save a lot of that sparsely recorded data for the future.
I still can't get over the silent film massacre - so many hit movies by acclaimed directors simply don't exist; or the BBC decades long video wiping spree, or the dumping of the DuMont network archives into the East River. Our views of the past are completely distorted because of these events; people who were unbelievably famous and influential passed into obscurity because most of their work was trashed, wiped, or on the DuMont network.
No reason to assume that things worth keeping will be kept. The assumption actually leads to the inaction that leads to the death of the things.
> I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done.
They're not in secret code (unless that was the intention.) If you had one you could figure out how to make a machine to read it.
> It would be a massive reverse engineering effort
It would be a moderately difficult reverse engineering effort.