Source: TW
Intro
The digital age carries with it the risk that records will either become swiftly illegible or completely vanish. (admittedly for 99% of the internet’s contents this is presumably not a great loss… ) Nevertheless, there is information that we are morally obliged to pass on.
MOM developed ceramic data carriers which conserves analogue text and images for unlimited intervals of time. Deep within the world’s oldest and still active saltmine in Hallstatt/Austria the MOM archive is protected for at least 1 million years. MOM is a global project and is built of stories which are collected and contributed by individuals across the planet.
MOM is a snapshot of our time and of course not a substitute for national archives but rather a supplement. MOM tells our descendants about us and the era we lived in; everyone can contribute to this story. It is free to contribute text and we to offer participation to every human on Earth, regardless of country of residence, religion, gender, and economic situation.
Concurrent to the stories submitted by individuals, MOM also consists of further contents which we are obliged to pass on for posterity: e.g. information about the locations of nuclear or toxic waste repositories.(5)
MOM is not a backup of our knowledge. Societies in the future who are capabale of discovering MOM will be at least as knowledgeable as us.(5) However, stories of how we gained knowledge and insight will certainly be of interest to the future. This is why PhD theses in particular are collected within MOM. For example, publications on gravitational waves are not collected per se but rather the means and devices we employ to detect them are worth documenting.
Storage tech
A durable data carrier is crucial. We use high-tech ceramic to store text and images permanently. In addition, the legibility needs to be guaranteed. The information in MOM is directly observable because it is analogue: Texts, illustrations, and photographs.(5)
We use two different methods:
1 A print with special ceramic colour-stains (in a 300 dpi resolution) for photographs and illustrations, similar to a conventional colour-laser-printer. The capacity is subject to the specified resolution.
2 The specially-developed Ceramic Microfilm (in b/w contrast) for texts and mono-coloured graphics. Here text is downsized (five lines per mm), but easily readable with a 10x magnifier. A tablet of Ceramic Microfilm (20×20 cm) can carry up to 5 million characters, this equals 5×400-pages books.
A book on Ceramic Microfilm requires 1/200 of the volume compared to the printed version.
Deciphering in the future
Since languages alter over time,
a deciphering tool will explain our languages,
in order to enable future linguists to reconstruct our present languages and how we use them today:
A very comprehensive Pictionary (thousands of images of concrete things and situations, directly labeled with the respective words)
combined with the theoretical volumes such as grammar, phrases, thesaurus, dictionary, etc.
Protection against unauthorized access
An archive which claims to persist for 1 million years must be protected from natural and non-natural influences.
The MOM archive is located 2 km deep inside the salt-deposit beneath the mountain Plassen in Hallstatt, Austria.
The geology of the mountain will allow the MOM archive to fully close itself by a natural phenomenon:
the salt “flows” with a speed of 2 cm/year into any void.
This will protect the archive from the greatest threat; man himself.
The pressure which results from the weight of the mountain
and a hypothetical ice shield of 5 km thickness is approximately a fifth of the burst pressure(=??) of the used materials.
In one of the next steps, you will learn how the MOM archive will be recovered.
Retrieval
A buried treasure such as the MOM archive needs to be marked somehow in order to be retrievable in the future.
If we would find something comparable today, we would apply our modern technologies: scan it, process it and translate it. The same find would have challenged the people of the 18th century or even of the mid-20th century.
Therefore a future society should find MOM only when it has a level of knowledge which is at least similar to our current state.
For that reason, the “marker” simultaneously needs to be discreet and obvious: Meaningless or irritating for those with insufficient knowledge but information-dense for someone with adequate comprehension and technologies.(5)
Uncountable identic small tokens made of strong ceramic undertake this task. People participating in MOM receive one and, in turn, this “treasure map” for the archive gets distributed all over the planet.
By means of landmarks (coast lines, the physical shape of a lake in Hallstatt, distances between mountains) the exact position of the MOM archive is displayed.
MOM Token
In order to understand the purpose and decode the token a particular knowledge is required:
- Understanding of active geological processes.
Coastlines will alter by a change of sea level; the shape of the lake (Hallstätter See) looks different after an ice age or it could disappear completely.
A society in the future which decides to begin the search for MOM needs to be able to reconstruct a coastline according to a given sea level or the shape and position of the lake.
(We’ve been able to reconstruct pre-glacial landscapes since the late 1980’s)
- A precisely-measured coordinate system
The two intersecting points of coast lines with longitude and altitude represent the coordinates of the entrance to the archive. Only a coordinate-grid measured by satellites is exact enough for these indications.
(in the 1970’s we started to measure the earth by satellites and since the 1990’s the accuracy has become sufficient enough. Before that the land-measuring by triangulation had a divergence of some 10 km between Hallstatt and the coast point in Norway)
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Seismic devices which can detect the cubic form of the archive against the distinct properties of ceramic and the salt deposit.
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Thermoluminescence needs to be known. This phenomenon facilitates to determine the age of silicate materials – or more precise: the time passed since the last heating over 600°C.(5) This method is used by archaeologists and art-historians to figure out the age of ceramics. The token is not only a treasure map but also a kind of clock (because it was fired at 1200°C to produce it). The age of the token will help future finders to reconstruct the coast-lines at a particular point in the past.
(thermoluminescence dating is known since the 1950’s)
There are several time capsule projects worldwide. They either denote a particular date to be opened again or the authors left it to chance whether they will be discovered at all.(5) In contrast to these time capsules the opening date of MOM is not pre-determined or depending upon an accidental discovery but it is strongly set by the design of the storage and the token.
Contents
First of all, MOM is not a backup of our knowledge. Knowledge gets modified and expands. Societies in the future who are capabale of discovering MOM will be at least as knowledgeable as us.
This is why we will not store the entire Wikipediain MOM (on one side it would be in a way presumptuous, on the other hand it could be only the Wikipedia from a particular date, because it is highly dynamic).
However, stories of how we gained knowledge and insight will certainly be of interest to the future. This is why PhD theses in particular are collected within MOM- and of coursethosewikipedia-articles, which document the history of the concerned item or topic.
For example, publications on gravitational waves are not collected per se but rather the means and devices we employ to detect them are worth documenting.
The content of MOM is split into 3 categories:
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automatically compiled contents In order to avoid a bias, e.g. the daily editorials of the major newspapers from every country
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contents which were preselected by institutions to be stored within MOM e.g. nuclear industry (descriptions of waste repositories); universities with PhD theses; Awards for science, art or literature
3 contents which are collected by individuals worldwide. Self-experienced or retold personal stories, description of hobbies, texts or lyrics which impressed you or influenced your life, and news-stories which describe our today; everything will be part of the big “Bottom Up Told History”.
Up to now, history was written by historians – in retrospect. Today within the age of open access, open source, and crowd processing, it is possible to write our own story – by ourselves and today.
This is the purpose of this website and everyone can contribute worldwide.
Digital records saved
Which digital records from our present days will be found in the future?
1 – The Big Oblivion
Data traffic, data processing, and data storage requires energy. Currently the internet requires more energy than Germany and France combined. The internet accounts for 3% of the global CO2 emission – this is twice as much emissions as those caused by the worldwide aviation industry.(5) The growth in data volume and the associated energy consumption increases exponentially. Sooner rather than later, we will reach a point when we – for economic and/or ecological reasons – cannot afford to keep everything. Deleting-algorithms will trawl through the internet and erase data which had no or too few accesses.(5)
Considering the content which comprises a significant portion of the internet today, much of this data will not be missed at all. But blogs will disappear, too. Blogs are the instant mirror of our time and comparable with written diaries. Blog-entries are interesting on the issuing day, maybe still after a week, but not a year after publication. Perhaps they become interesting after 100 years, but it is not very likely these accounts will survive at this point of time. A time may come, when forthcoming generations may recall times in which books and magazines were printed, but not within the recent, immediate past; a phenomenon we may paraphrase as “Global Alzheimer”.
What is interesting within the old newspapers you find in old cabinets or as wrapping paper for old stuff in the attic? The advertising! Sometimes these contents are amusing as they mirror the respective time, for instance the depiction of women in commercials from the 1950’s. Advertisments on websites will simply not exist in 100 years. They are replaced already by the time a new campaign emerges online.
2 – The Age of Morons
We know approximately 0.1 to 1 % of the literature from antiquity. Publishing was costly and we may assume the published texts were significant. This is why we can reconstruct, even from this tiny fragment, the world and mindset of the antiquity.
Today, not only newspapers and scientists are publishing, EVERYONE is: every post, tweet, video is publishing. Since pseudo-science attracts a wider audience than scientific papers, we find that there are more websites devoted to crop-circles than gravitational waves.
Furthermore there are more Youtube-videos about people hurting themselves in exceptionally ludicrous ways (for instance trying to stand on an inflated exercise ball) than videos about people performing spectacular feats of human intellect.
Now, imagine what a 0.1% random data fragment may contain. It will be, in a particular way, representative for our days but it will certainly not contain the fields we undertake huge effort for or spend great amounts of money on: Research, science, medicine, LHC, … People in the future may think we never performed spaceflight, because we obviously haven’t even figured out the law of gravity…