Knowledge preservation

How to best preserve our knowledge (physical and spiritual) and texts?

See - https://rebrand.ly/dg-archive

Media

Lists of oldest surviving documents - wiki

6k+ yr

Ceramic microfilms

Ceramic microfilm MOM project, which is a 1 mm thick rock-hard sheet 8 x 8 inches (20 × 20 cm). The tablets can withstand alkali and acid environments, but also temperatures up to 1300 degrees Celsius. A laser is then used to etch character, full-colour graphics.

The smallest text size is 4 pt in Arial style. It is the still readable with the naked eye. The capacity (of latin letters) is about 40 000 characters on the 20x20 cm surface of a MOM tablet.

Further compression - Holds 1-5 million characters of text that could be read with a 10x magnifying lens. (Half way during the development of the Cerabyte technology and patented this as a kind of ceramic microfilm)

Ceramic colors

Special ceramic colors or stains are used by MOM project to print photographs and illustrations with 300 dpi resolution.

Clay tablets

Babylonian clay tablets have survived from 4000 BCE (=7k years). But they are fragile - and need to be preserved.

David Zaitlyn used morse in 2013.

Stone

Stone tablets survive from 3500 BCE.

Is there an automated rock engraver - to engrave given text into a rock slab?? (analogous to CNC on metal https://youtube.com/watch?v=SdSVMygb450 ) Want to preserve important knowledge.

Synthetic sapphire disks

Synthetic sapphire disc of 200mm diameter from ARNANO.

Religious oral tradition

Eg. Vedas.

Nickel

Durability
  • Pure 100% nickel; Nickel has no half-life; it’s a stable element; it lasts forever
  • Nickel is used in ocean motors and in rockets because of its properties. Stainless steel only needs 7% of nickel to make it not rust
  • Hard metal that is difficult to damage physically. Withstands exposure to a wide range of chemicals. Does not oxidize
  • Biological organisms cannot consume or damage it.
  • Not affected by radiation, heat, cold, humidity, moisture or even immersion in freshwater; salt water can gradually affect it but even after many thousands of years of constant salt water exposure, the content is retrievable,
  • Still readable even after thousands of years exposed to oxygen or submerged in water
  • 2000 degree Fahrenheit sustained direct heat from a blowtorch will not damage it
  • Electric and magnetic fields have no effect on it. Strong radiation from nuclear blasts, high energy cosmic rays, or electromagnetic pulses will not damage the content. Designed to preserve information in case of nuclear war (Studied by Los Alamos National Laboratories; extensively tested)
Nanofiche
  • Rosetta Nickel Disk (Long Now).

The Library is housed within a 100 gram nanotechnology device that resembles a 120mm DVD. However it is actually composed of 25 nickel discs, each only 40 microns thick, that were made for the Arch Mission Foundation by NanoArchival.

The first four layers contain more than 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photographs, illustrations, and documents - etched as 150 to 200 dpi, at increasing levels of magnification, by optical nanolithography. The first analog layer is the Front Cover and is visible to the naked eye. …

Beneath the analog layers of the Library are 21 layers of 40 micron thick nickel foils, each containing a DVD master.
Source: TW, arch

Metal grammaphone records

Can even record sound for grammaphone.

Voyager golden record - copper disk 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter plated first with nickel and then gold. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years in sterile space.

Other Metal plates

Metal plates risk being stolen, melted and reused in a metal-scarce world.

Metal engraving is relatively easy with a CNC machine.

Fused quartz Crystals

can store up to 360 terabytes of information (in the largest size) without loss for billions of years.
It can withstand the high and low extremes of freezing, fire and temperatures of up to 1000°C. The crystal can also withstand direct impact force of up to 10 ton per cm2 and is unchanged by long exposure to cosmic radiation.

The team at Southampton, led by Professor Peter Kazansky , use ultra-fast lasers to precisely inscribe data into nanostructured voids orientated within silica - with feature sizes as small as 20 nanometres.

Unlike marking only on the surface of a 2D piece of paper or magnetic tape, this method of encoding uses two optical dimensions and three spatial co-ordinates to write throughout the material - hence the ‘5D’ in its name.
Source: TW

.5-1k yr

Polymer Nanofiche

  • Nanofiche can be replicated from nickel to polymer any number of times, inexpensively. Polymer lasts for 400 to 700 years. Source: TW

Piql film

arctic world archive uses piqlFilm, which claims -

  • Longevity tested to survive for over 500 years.
  • Future-proof WORM medium Offline and secure

Silicon Waferfiche

Source: TW

  • temperature and water-resistant
  • Needs only a magnifying glass to read.
  • photolithographic inscription small copies
Cost

it costs about ten times less to store documents on Waferfiche than on microfilm.

202308 info -

Like all semiconductor products, it is very much a function of volume and labor costs.
In Bharat, a one time investment of about $250 K, and approximately Rs 5K per waferfiche.

Archival DVDs

  • 1000 Years Archival Hitachi/LG Digital Storage Blank M-Disc DVD+R | 4.7GB | 3 Pack Jewel Case

Palm leaf / birch manuscripts

Last few decades to 600 years, depending on local climatic conditions.

Papyrus

Made from plant leaves. No fold-endurance - Used as a scroll. Degrades due to acidic nature.

Dead Sea Scrolls were preserved due to low-circulation arid atmosphere.

Microfilms

polyester based microfilm - .1-.5k yrs. Used for storing newspapers.

Microfiche has a life expectancy of up to 800 years, under ideal HVAC (temperature and humidity ) controlled conditions.
However most State Archives only certify microfiche, for 25 to 50 years,
after which point a new copy of the media must be generated.

Parchment (Skin)

Treated animal skin. If reused, called palimpest.
Parchments from 1600 years ago survive - many were in regular use for hundreds of years.

Source: TW

DNA

Artifical amber

an option is to encode future Arch Libraries into synthetic DNA molecules and then to embed these into substances such as Artificial Amber for long-term preservation and discovery in the future. … DNA is quite stable if adequately protected. Source: TW

Junk DNA

One possible target for this type of synthetic biology approach that we have considered is to utilize the so-called “junk DNA” region of the human genome, or of other species, as the carrier region for a payload of genetically encoded knowledge. However, unless such information is somehow linked to a gene that has selective advantages to survival (such as reproduction, for instance), it would get weeded out by natural selection over time. Source: TW

.1k-.3k yr

Museium grade paper

Curators love these papers because they’re made of 100% cotton rag and have no OBAs. The base stock is both acid- and lignin-free. The coating is acid-free.

it must be manufactured using pure cotton fibres (a.k.a. cotton rag) or pure alpha cellulose fibres, which are naturally more durable than wood pulp.

Must still be saved from acidic mats and sunlight.

Archival paper

Archival papers are (~100%) acid-free and lignin-free.
They can be made of virgin tree fiber (alpha-cellulose) or 25% to 100% cotton rag.
Oft contains an alkaline reserve of calcium or magnesium carbonate to prevent acid degradation. This alkaline reserve can be achieved by adding bicarbonate during the drying process, which converts to calcium or magnesium carbonate. To last at least 100 years, archival paper needs an alkaline reserve of at least 2%.

Still, atmospheric pollutants cause acidity and degradation.

Pigment Ink

~ 50 yrs before beginning to fade.

Photo grade paper

Most photo-grade paper is resin-coated and designed to look and feel like modern photo lab paper. The core is covered by a thin layer of polyethylene (plastic) coating, which gives the paper its photo feel, stability (flatness), water resistance, handling resistance, and excellent feed consistency.

All resin-coated papers fall short of archival-grade for two reasons. First, the plastic content is not technically archival by museum standards. Second, the resin coating is slightly acidic, which will deteriorate the paper over time.

Dye ink

~ 20 yrs before beginning to fade.

Common paper

Paper, having acid, degrades over time.
Wood pulp is oft used. Has lignin, which breaks down to acid over time.
you can put stable ink on non-archival paper and still achieve 70 years of on-display life.

.01k yr

Shellac records

Quite brittle.

Vinyl records

Last 100 yrs under good conditions.

CDs, Hard disk

CDs are vulnerable to wear
hard drives limited by lifespan of only 4-5 years

Retrieval/ playback

Grammaphone doesn’t require electricity to play sound. It’s relatively easy to construct.

Magnifying lens

The first recorded evidence of a magnifying device is in a joke in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, from 424 BC, although there are also artifacts that may be even earlier magnifiers. … Compound microscopes began to become available in the 1674, when Anton van Leeuwenhoek first discerned cells and bacteria at 270X magnification, and by the late 1600s microscopy had advanced enough to see the analog images we encode into the Arch Libraries. Source: TW

Technology risk

If you rely on proprietary software to store your material (office, databases, cloud-subscriptions, etc.), everything will be gone in less than half a century (at least if you don’t have more resources than US government and NASA: Many of the recordings of the space explorations of the 60ies are now inaccessible: neither the machines nor the knowledge is available today to access it). - digitaldharma

Storage

  • Cold storage reduces chemical decay rate.
  • Low humidity prevents mold.
  • Store away from insects and rodents.

Profession

  • Record keepers
    • Recordkeepers are responsible for documents from the moment they are created by an entity up to and beyond the point when they are preserved solely as archives
  • Archivists
    • Archivists tend to be responsible for records once they become archives and are thus no longer used for their original purpose.
    • Canadian council of Archives recommendations 2003

Location

  • Temples
    • one should have an effort to engrave important texts on to temple walls.

Other efforts

  • Memory of Mankind archive - Hallstatt/Austria
    • The geological structure of the surrounding rock must not destroy the archive.

Content

  • Global village construction kit here