1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility

Robert Baer wrote:
Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
Sorry for repost, I posted to sci.electronics before, which does not
exist.

Hi!

I'm planning a robotic facility [3] that needs to maintain hardware
(exchange defective parts) autonomously for up to 1000 years. One of the
problems is to maintain firmware and operating systems for this period.
What methods do you think are suitable?

Top priority is it must work about 1000 years. Price is not a big issue,
if necessary.

I thought about this:

ROMs/PROMs, replacing them when checksum fails.
* add - 3 in "parallel" using majority logic for output a and checking.


But it's still semiconductor storage, susceptible to cosmic ray damage
and stuff. So should be shielded from that.


ROM/PROM masters, being copied once a year to flash ROM.
* see above.


1000 flash ROMs, refreshing once a year from the ones that still have a
valid checksum.
* see above.

** Semiconductor storage is useless in a RAD environment.


Not if shielded. It must be the fuse type arrays, the non-reprogrammable
ones.


Non electronic masters:

Microfilm/microfiche
* Degrades - maybe not as fast as the old acetate movie films, but 100
year life is not realistic (but may be better in a RAD environment).

HD-Rosetta (ion beam engraved nickel disc)
* of ideas mentioned,this seems the best. now,how does it get read?


By going on the Microsoft help pages. Not sure where the MSFT stock
price will be 1000 years from now though :-)


glass CD/DVD
* maybe good enough for 20-10 years.

Paper [2]
* NOPE! Leather,if kept in a dry environment is at least an order of
magnitude better (eg: Dead Sea scrolls). Proven technology. Proven
characteristics. Good enough for a few thousand years.


Nope. The dead sea scrolls, like many other ancient documents, were
written on parchment paper and on papyrus. And they were just tucked
into a cave without much other protection.

Nowadays one could even engrave in porcelain with a laser. That's last
way longer than 1000 years if nobody runs the bulldozer over it.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

In sci.electronics.design Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Fri, 03 May 2013 18:28:17 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

People tell me that Spanish, like Cervantes, has changed very little
compared to English.

I asked a co-worker who was fluent in Chinese about this once. If I
remember right, he said that he could read written Chinese as old as a
couple of thousand years and it would pretty much make sense. He also
said that he could understand written Japanese, but if he tried to
speak it, someone fluent in spoken Japanese wouldn't understand him;
the pronunciation would be wrong.

Also Latin, which was the reason that the legal profession adopted it
as their favored language. Since it's a dead language, it's unlikely
to change.

I figured it was a customer lock-in tactic, like EBCDIC and Word .doc .

1000 years from now, it will look as strange as Olde English.

Pic related: http://xkcd.com/771/ (sfw)

Matt Roberds

On May 3, 2:00*am, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
Sorry for repost, I posted to sci.electronics before, which does not exist.

In article ,
Joerg wrote:

* NOPE! Leather,if kept in a dry environment is at least an order of
magnitude better (eg: Dead Sea scrolls). Proven technology. Proven
characteristics. Good enough for a few thousand years.


Nope. The dead sea scrolls, like many other ancient documents, were
written on parchment paper and on papyrus. And they were just tucked
into a cave without much other protection.

Ummm... parchment *is* leather. Well, hide, at least. It's an animal
product, not paper.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Dave Platt wrote:
In article ,
Joerg wrote:

* NOPE! Leather,if kept in a dry environment is at least an order of
magnitude better (eg: Dead Sea scrolls). Proven technology. Proven
characteristics. Good enough for a few thousand years.

Nope. The dead sea scrolls, like many other ancient documents, were
written on parchment paper and on papyrus. And they were just tucked
into a cave without much other protection.

Ummm... parchment *is* leather. Well, hide, at least. It's an animal
product, not paper.


True, it is an animal product. But some of the dead sea scrolls were
written on papyrus and that is not animal-based.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

In article , Bernhard Kuemel
wrote:

Sorry for repost, I posted to sci.electronics before, which does not exist.

Hi!

I'm planning a robotic facility [3] that needs to maintain hardware
(exchange defective parts) autonomously for up to 1000 years. One of the
problems is to maintain firmware and operating systems for this period.
What methods do you think are suitable?

Top priority is it must work about 1000 years. Price is not a big issue,
if necessary.

I thought about this:

ROMs/PROMs, replacing them when checksum fails.

ROM/PROM masters, being copied once a year to flash ROM.

1000 flash ROMs, refreshing once a year from the ones that still have a
valid checksum.

Non electronic masters:

Microfilm/microfiche
HD-Rosetta (ion beam engraved nickel disc)
glass CD/DVD
Paper [2]
punched cards

The drawback of the non electronic masters is their reader system which
can fail mechanically/optically (dust, gears, ...) and requires
electronic components/firmware themselves.

Is it possible to make robots or their spare parts that suffer only
minor degradation when kept as spare parts for 1000 years at good
storage conditions? semiconductors, inductors, (non electrolytic)
capacitors, circuit boards, plastic/metal structures, CCD/CMOS cameras,
actuators, solar cells, thermo couples, etc. Batteries are probably
difficult.


Thanks, Bernhard


[1]
http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html
http://www.norsam.com/nanorosettawp.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta

[2]
something like http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

[3]
A cold store to keep humans frozen (vitrified) in LN2 until mind
uploading (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_u...ial_sectioning ) becomes
possible.

No semiconductor will continue to work for 1,000 years - the carefully
crafted variations in impurity concentrations (the doping) will diffuse
out to uniformity long before. The smaller the features, the faster
this will happen. The lower the temperature, the slower the diffusion,
but this isn't much help over 1000 years, even at arctic temperatures.

As for long-term storage of information, two thoughts come to mind.
First, for the millennium celebrations, The New York Times decided to
make and widely disperse a umber to time capsules; these being
intended to be opened 1,000 years hence. Basically nothing worked
except nickel sheets with natural-language texts engraved into the
surface using an electron beam. The text was rendered in English and a
number of other languages, so it would also serve as a Rosetta Stone.
Anyway, the whole process was described in a set of articles in the NYT
Magazine published in 1999.

More recently, the ability to convert arbitrary text into DNA, and to
read the text back gives us a way to store huge amounts of binary
information for millennia.

One can also store bulk binary on nickel sheet by writing code blocks
in hexadecimal, with embedded error correcting codes.

Joe Gwinn


Some links:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/02/ar...-for-times-cap
sule.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/05/ma...time-capsule.h
tml?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...82598835075431
50.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ature11875.htm
l

On Sat, 04 May 2013 11:28:27 -0700, wrote:

On May 3, 2:00Â*am, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
Sorry for repost, I posted to sci.electronics before, which does not
exist.

This might sound weird, but consider posting in rec.arts.sf.science
where the topic has been discussed by fairly tech-savvy people
blunders in SF stories about data that lasts for very long times to
sustain widely dispersed long-lived cultures.

Hi!

I'm planning a robotic facility [3] that needs to maintain hardware
(exchange defective parts) autonomously for up to 1000 years. One of
the problems is to maintain firmware and operating systems for this
period. What methods do you think are suitable?

I recall some SF story I read a long time ago with a similar line. It was
about a beehive style human culture maintained by self-repairing machines
(much as described here) And then the machines began to stop. Naturally
hilarity ensues...

I would point out that there is a difference here between maintaining
digital data for 1000 years (hard enough to do) and maintaining FIRMWARE
for 1000 years.

In the first case you store the data (say in a refractory cubic
transparent crystal that was built up crystal layer by crystal layer
using defects to store data. The data is only in the CENTER of the object
so even if the outside is dirty and degraded for whatever reason, The
damage can be polished off and the data read. But reading is entirely up
to the skilz of the future generation.

Firmware, on the other hand implies that you are constantly reading and
using the data. This is a whole different kettle of worms. Now the life
expectance and reliability of the READER becomes involved! I found it
interesting that the millennium clock does not display time, only keeps
it! When a human enters the cave (whatever) THEY have to pull the weight
that runs the display. And then the display shuts off until the next
person visits. That greatly reduces all display wear etc. But for
firmware running a robotic facility reading would have to be more or less
regularly.

On 2013-05-04, Joe Gwinn wrote:

One can also store bulk binary on nickel sheet by writing code blocks
in hexadecimal, with embedded error correcting codes.

or more compact symbologies like QR or matrix codes.


--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

On Fri, 3 May 2013 10:58:17 -0700, (Dave Platt)
wrote:

Take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
http://longnow.org/clock/
Their work is, in some ways, a much simpler problem than what you're
proposing, and it's still a very difficult problem.

Also:
http://www.10000yearclock.net

Does the 10,000 year clock come with a warranty?

At this time, there is a 16 second difference between GPS atomic clock
time and UTC, which is based on astronomical time.
http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm
http://leapsecond.com/java/nixie.htm
They were identical on Jan 6, 1980 and are diverging at the rate of
about 2 seconds per year. Ignoring variations in the earths speed of
rotation:
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html
in 1000 years, the two clocks might be 2000 seconds or 33 hours
different.


--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

wrote:
In sci.electronics.design Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Fri, 03 May 2013 18:28:17 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

People tell me that Spanish, like Cervantes, has changed very little
compared to English.

I asked a co-worker who was fluent in Chinese about this once. If I
remember right, he said that he could read written Chinese as old as a
couple of thousand years and it would pretty much make sense. He also
said that he could understand written Japanese, but if he tried to
speak it, someone fluent in spoken Japanese wouldn't understand him;
the pronunciation would be wrong.


I was totally surprised this week when I worked with several Chinese
scientists at our university. I asked why they don't speak Mandarin or
Cantonese when among themselves. "He is from Shanghai and we are from
the north so we can't understand each other at all".

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/