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#81
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
On Sat, 11 May 2013 12:27:10 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote: Jeff Liebermann wrote Jeroen wrote Jeff Liebermann wrote Mother nature, Microsoft, and satellite technology have provided examples the long term survivability that work. Mother nature offers evolution, where a species adapts to changing conditions. Microsoft has Windoze updates, which similarly adapts a know buggy operating system into a somewhat less buggy operating system. I beg to differ! Somewhat different bugs, sure. Somewhat less buggy, surely not! Ok, not the best example. Yeah, its nothing like evolution in fact. If we are using the evolutional model, several sites with different technologies must be used. Some of these sites are successful, some are not, but of course we do not know in advance, which system will survive and which will fail. |
#82
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
"Bernhard Kuemel" wrote in message ... On 05/10/2013 07:44 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote: On Fri, 10 May 2013 04:53:40 +1000, "Rod Speed" wrote: "Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message ... Actually, the biggest problem are the human operators. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactor meltdowns comes to mind, where the humans involved made things worse by their attempts to fix things. Yeah, maybe autonomous would better than human maintained. I don't believe it's possible to achieve 1000 year reliability for electronics and mechanisms. If it moves, it breaks... unless something extraordinary (and expensive) is employed. He did say that cost was no object. I once worked on a cost plus project, which is essentially an unlimited cost system. They pulled the plug before we even got started because we had exceeded some unstated limit. There's no such thing as "cost is no object". I said: "Price is not a big issue, if necessary." I know it's gonna be expensive and we certainly need custom designed parts, but a whole semiconductor fab and developing radically new semiconductors are probably beyond our limits. The list of probable hazards are just too great for such a device. That stuff doesn't matter if it can repair what breaks. Repair how and using what materials? Have the robots fetch a spare part from the storage and replace it. Circuit boards, CPUs, connectors, cameras, motors, gears, galvanic cells/membranes of the vanadium redox flow batteries, thermo couples, etc. They need to be designed and arranged so the robots can replace them. Ok, lets see if that works. The typical small signal transistor has an MTBF of 300,000 to 600,000 hrs or 34 to 72 years. I'll call it 50 year so I can do the math without finding my calculator. MTBF (mean time between failures) does not predict the life of the device, but merely predicts the interval at which failures might be expected. So, for the 1000 year life of this device, a single common signal transistor would be expected to blow up 200 times. Assuming the robot has about 1000 such transistors, you would need 200,000 spares to make this work. You can increase the MTBF using design methods common in satellite work, but at best, you might be able to increase it to a few million hours. It's quite common that normal computer parts work 10 years. High reliability parts probably last 50 years. Keep 100 spare parts of each and they last 1000 years, if they don't deteriorate in storage. Yeah, that should be doable. Also robots are usually idle and only active when there's something to replace. The power supply, LN2 generator and sensors are more active. I wonder how reliable rails or overhead cranes that carry robots and parts around are. Those can certainly be designed to last 1000 years. If replacing rails or overhead crane beams is necessary and unfeasible, the robots will probably drive with wheels. Yeah, I don't see any need for overhead crane beams. If you can get the electronics that drives everything to last 1000 years by replacement of what fails, the mechanical stuff they need to move parts around should be easy enough. Obviously with multiple devices that move parts around so when one fails you just stop using that one etc. Geosynchronous satellites are unlikely to suffer from serious orbital decay. However, they have been known to drift out of their assigned orbital slot due to various failures. Unlike LEO and MEO, their useful life is not dictated by orbital decay. So, why are they not designed to last more than about 30 years? Because we evolve. We update TV systems, switch from analog to digital etc. My cryo store just needs to the same thing for a long time. It doesn't actually. The approach the egyptians took lasted fine, even when the locals chose to strip off the best of the decoration to use in their houses etc. Corse its unlikely that you could actually afford something that big and hard to destroy. At the risk of being repetitive, the reason that one needs to improve firmware over a 1000 year time span is to allow it to adapt to unpredictable and changing conditions. Initially there will be humans verifying how the cryo store does and improve soft/firmware and probably some hardware, too, but there may well be a point where they are no longer available. Then it shall continue autonomously. That conflicts with your other proposal of a tomb like thing in the Australian desert. Its going to be hard to stop those involved in checking its working from telling anyone about it. There is going to be one hell of a temptation for one of them to spill the beans to 60 Minutes etc. It would be a hell of a lot safer to not even attempt any improvements, just replace what dies. True. However, not providing a means of improving or adapting the system to changing conditions will relegate this machine to the junk yard in a fairly short time. All it takes is one hiccup or environmental "leak", that wasn't considered by the designers, and it's dead. Yes. We need to consider very thoroughly every failure mode. And when something unexpected happens, the cryo facility will call for help via radio/internet. At which time you have just blown your disguise as a tomb. I even thought of serving live video of the facility so it remains popular and people might call the cops if someone tries to harm it. Its more likely to just attract vandals who watch the video. Volunteers could fix bugs or implement hard/software for not considered failure modes. Or they might just point and laugh instead. |
#83
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
On Sat, 11 May 2013 09:56:24 +0300, upsidedown wrote:
On Fri, 10 May 2013 21:59:18 +0200, Bernhard Kuemel wrote: It's quite common that normal computer parts work 10 years. High reliability parts probably last 50 years. Keep 100 spare parts of each and they last 1000 years, if they don't deteriorate in storage. Did you see the pictures of the Fukushima reactor control room ? So 1970's :-) But generally, also in many other heavy industry sectors with the actual industrial hardware being used for 50-200 years, you might still keep over 30 years old sensors, actuators, field cables and I/O cards, while upgrading higher level functions, such as control rooms, to modern technology. Oddly I've got some radio from the 1920s that are still working fine (one A****er Kent had the pot metal tuning mechanism disintegrate, but if you tuned each capacitor by hand it still worked fine). But radios of essentially the same technology from the 30s an 40s are all dead. Parts like electrolytic capacitors do not have long life. The "improvement" of tubes with cathode coatings also limited their useful life. Today, since short lifetime parts are just too convenient to ignore, nobody builds for any extended life. Electronic lifetimes just keep getting shorter and shorter. Some years ago I started a project of an electronic grandfather "superclock". But the idea was not to simply build an accurate clock, but to build one that several hundred years from now would still be running as accurately. (Same idea as a mechanical grandfather clock...ever notice the similarity of a tall grandfather clock to a relay rack... get the picture) But I soon discovered that building electronics with several hundred year life is not so simple. Making sure all you capacitors are of materials that don't degrade, that active parts have a decent life time and all the rest takes some careful considerations even if the electronics ends up shielded in air-tight containers. Sure you can pick out things like ceramic and glass capacitors and other items that will work for hundreds of years but using ONLY those items to build a complex device takes some serious design thought. |
#84
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
On Fri, 10 May 2013 21:59:18 +0200, Bernhard Kuemel
wrote: That stuff doesn't matter if it can repair what breaks. Repair how and using what materials? Have the robots fetch a spare part from the storage and replace it. Circuit boards, CPUs, connectors, cameras, motors, gears, galvanic cells/membranes of the vanadium redox flow batteries, thermo couples, etc. They need to be designed and arranged so the robots can replace them. I'm thinking there may be a different way to do this. The basic problem is that the life of an electronic system can currently be built that will last about 50 years before MTBF declares that problems will begin. With redundancy and spares, this might be extended to 100 years. The building will last somewhat longer, but probably no more than 100 years before maintenance problems arrive. Rather than replace all the individual components, I suggest you consider replacing the entire building and all the machinery every 50-100 years. Instead of one building, you build two buildings, in alternation. When the first facility approaches the end of its designed life, construction on a 2nd facility begins adjacent to the first facility. It would be an all new design, building upon the lessons learned from its predecessor, but also taking advantage of any technological progress from the previous 100 years. Instead of perpetually cloning obsolete technology, this method allows you to benefit from progress. When the new facility is finished, the severed heads are moved from the old facility to the new. The old equipment can then be scrapped, and the building torn down to await the next reconstruction in 100 years. Note: The 100 year interval is arbitrary, my guess(tm), and probably wrong. The MTBF may also increase with technical progress over time. Yes. We need to consider very thoroughly every failure mode. It's called a finite state machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine Every state, including failure modes, must have a clearly defined output state, which in this case defines the appropriate action. These are very efficient, quite reliable, but require that all possible states be considered. That's not easy. A friend previously did medical electronics and used a finite states. Every possible combination of front panel control and input was considered before the machines servo would move. Well, that was the plan, but some clueless operator, who couldn't be bothered to read the instructions, found a sequence of front panel button pushing that put the machine into an undefined and out of control state. You'll have the same problem. Some unlikely combination of inputs, that were completely impossible in accordance to even the worst case operating conditions, will happen and ruin everything. I've seen state diagrams and tables, for fairly simple machines, cover a wall of an office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_diagram And when something unexpected happens, the cryo facility will call for help via radio/internet. Maybe. I have some good stories of alarms going awry. The short version is that too few and too many alarms are both a problem. Too few and there's not enough warning to be able to prevent a failure. Too many, and the humans that are expected to fix the problem treat it as "normal" and over a period of time, ignore the alarm (Chicken Little effect). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_little I've seen it happen. I did some process control work at a local cannery. Plenty of sensors and alarms everywhere. Because maintenance was overextended, the sensors were constantly getting clogged with food residue. Rather than keep them clean, someone simply increased the sensor sensitivity so that it would work through the encrusted food residue layers. The result was constant false alarms, as the overly sensitive sensors failed to distinguish between a line stoppage or another layer of filth. The false alarms were far worse when the sensors were cleaned, which served as a good excuse to never clean them. I managed to fix the problem just before the cannery closed and moved to Mexico. Hint: Building and planning alarm systems is not easy. Volunteers could fix bugs or implement hard/software for not considered failure modes. I suspect that you are not involved in running a volunteer organization. In terms of reliability, volunteers can be anything from totally wonderful to an absolute disaster. Because the usual "carrot and stick" financial incentives are lacking with volunteers, there's very little you can do to motivate or control volunteers. If you demand that they do something that they consider personally repulsive, they'll just walk away. Please talk with someone that runs a volunteer organization for additional clues. -- Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558 |
#85
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message ... On Fri, 10 May 2013 21:59:18 +0200, Bernhard Kuemel wrote: That stuff doesn't matter if it can repair what breaks. Repair how and using what materials? Have the robots fetch a spare part from the storage and replace it. Circuit boards, CPUs, connectors, cameras, motors, gears, galvanic cells/membranes of the vanadium redox flow batteries, thermo couples, etc. They need to be designed and arranged so the robots can replace them. I'm thinking there may be a different way to do this. The basic problem is that the life of an electronic system can currently be built that will last about 50 years before MTBF declares that problems will begin. With redundancy and spares, this might be extended to 100 years. The building will last somewhat longer, but probably no more than 100 years before maintenance problems arrive. That's just plain wrong when its designed to last 1000 years in the first place without any maintenance. Rather than replace all the individual components, I suggest you consider replacing the entire building and all the machinery every 50-100 years. That's much harder to achieve with an autonomous system with no humans involved. Instead of one building, you build two buildings, in alternation. When the first facility approaches the end of its designed life, construction on a 2nd facility begins adjacent to the first facility. It would be an all new design, building upon the lessons learned from its predecessor, but also taking advantage of any technological progress from the previous 100 years. Impossible with an autonomous system with no humans involved. Instead of perpetually cloning obsolete technology, this method allows you to benefit from progress. But does necessarily involve someone keeping humans involved in doing that for 1000 years, just to keep your head. Good luck with that. When the new facility is finished, the severed heads are moved from the old facility to the new. The old equipment can then be scrapped, and the building torn down to await the next reconstruction in 100 years. And how do you proposed to recruit a new crew of humans the next time you need to replace everything except the heads ? Note: The 100 year interval is arbitrary, my guess(tm), and probably wrong. The MTBF may also increase with technical progress over time. Yes. We need to consider very thoroughly every failure mode. It's called a finite state machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine Every state, including failure modes, must have a clearly defined output state, which in this case defines the appropriate action. These are very efficient, quite reliable, but require that all possible states be considered. That's not easy. A friend previously did medical electronics and used a finite states. Every possible combination of front panel control and input was considered before the machines servo would move. Well, that was the plan, but some clueless operator, who couldn't be bothered to read the instructions, found a sequence of front panel button pushing that put the machine into an undefined and out of control state. You'll have the same problem. Not if there are no humans involved. Some unlikely combination of inputs, that were completely impossible in accordance to even the worst case operating conditions, will happen and ruin everything. I've seen state diagrams and tables, for fairly simple machines, cover a wall of an office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_diagram And when something unexpected happens, the cryo facility will call for help via radio/internet. Maybe. I have some good stories of alarms going awry. The short version is that too few and too many alarms are both a problem. Too few and there's not enough warning to be able to prevent a failure. Too many, and the humans that are expected to fix the problem treat it as "normal" and over a period of time, ignore the alarm (Chicken Little effect). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_little I've seen it happen. I did some process control work at a local cannery. Plenty of sensors and alarms everywhere. Because maintenance was overextended, the sensors were constantly getting clogged with food residue. Rather than keep them clean, someone simply increased the sensor sensitivity so that it would work through the encrusted food residue layers. The result was constant false alarms, as the overly sensitive sensors failed to distinguish between a line stoppage or another layer of filth. The false alarms were far worse when the sensors were cleaned, which served as a good excuse to never clean them. I managed to fix the problem just before the cannery closed and moved to Mexico. Hint: Building and planning alarm systems is not easy. Volunteers could fix bugs or implement hard/software for not considered failure modes. I suspect that you are not involved in running a volunteer organization. In terms of reliability, volunteers can be anything from totally wonderful to an absolute disaster. Because the usual "carrot and stick" financial incentives are lacking with volunteers, there's very little you can do to motivate or control volunteers. If you demand that they do something that they consider personally repulsive, they'll just walk away. Please talk with someone that runs a volunteer organization for additional clues. |
#86
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
Re 1000 year data storage:
Could Intel or some other company use modern equipment but old design rules to make the integrated circuits have a much longer expected lifetime? It seems like it might be possible that if dimensions of the devices were made larger then things would last longer. I know that making flash memory just a few times larger and using only single level cells increases the number of reliable life cycles 100's of times (1000 to hundreds of thousands) while at the same time raising the data decay time from a couple of about a year to about a 10 years. Refreshing every year would only require 1000's of write cycles, well within the 100's of thousands possible. I think the functions besides memory storage a couple 10's of years now, but I don't know if making things a few times larger and tuning the manufacturing process would get to a 1000 years. (For example, I don't know if the memory cells would last a 1000 years, but data decay would not be a problem since only 100's of rewrites/cell would be needed for refresh and 100's of thousands are possible. (Actually, millions of rewrite cycles are likely to be possible.) Changing the designed circuit speed, the actual clock rate, and operating voltage can also improve expected lifetime. A long term power source would still be an issue unless things can be made to not need refresh. I don't know how things scale, so I used the numbers for actual products to get back to 10 year decay time. I don't know if you would have to make things logarithmically bigger in 1 dimension, or perhaps 2 or 3 or if linearly bigger in 1 dimension or perhaps 2 or 3, of if making things much bigger than the old stuff would increase the expected lifetime. |
#87
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
Mark F wrote
Re 1000 year data storage: Could Intel or some other company use modern equipment but old design rules to make the integrated circuits have a much longer expected lifetime? Yes, but how much longer is less clear. It seems like it might be possible that if dimensions of the devices were made larger then things would last longer. And particularly if the design was to minimise diffusion somehow. I guess that since it's a cryo facility, one obvious way to get a longer life is to run the ICs at that very low temp too etc. I know that making flash memory just a few times larger and using only single level cells increases the number of reliable life cycles 100's of times (1000 to hundreds of thousands) while at the same time raising the data decay time from a couple of about a year to about a 10 years. Refreshing every year would only require 1000's of write cycles, well within the 100's of thousands possible. You'd be better off with some form of ROM instead life wise. I think the functions besides memory storage a couple 10's of years now, Much longer than that with core. but I don't know if making things a few times larger and tuning the manufacturing process would get to a 1000 years. (For example, I don't know if the memory cells would last a 1000 years, but data decay would not be a problem since only 100's of rewrites/cell would be needed for refresh and 100's of thousands are possible. (Actually, millions of rewrite cycles are likely to be possible.) Like I said, ROM is more viable for very long term storage. Changing the designed circuit speed, the actual clock rate, and operating voltage can also improve expected lifetime. A long term power source would still be an issue unless things can be made to not need refresh. Yes, that's the big advantage of ROM and core. I don't know how things scale, so I used the numbers for actual products to get back to 10 year decay time. I don't know if you would have to make things logarithmically bigger in 1 dimension, or perhaps 2 or 3 or if linearly bigger in 1 dimension or perhaps 2 or 3, of if making things much bigger than the old stuff would increase the expected lifetime. |
#88
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
On May 6, 3:40*pm, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 05/06/13 12:16, wrote: On May 5, 6:33 pm, *wrote: In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage *wrote: For some reason, there are a lot of people with big egos and low itelligence that want to believe these marketing lies. Never ceases to amaze me. It is also fascinating that the most significant (and well-known in the data archival community) problem is blatantly ignored: The equipment for reading the storage devices needs to survive as well and the software for processing it and hardware it runs on too. That means this hardware has to stay in production, as these components will have a shelf-life well below 30 years. * *I made the assumption that the robots themselves would be the "read hardware" All this prompts the question of whether human culture will last, to the point that anyone will care about decoding 1's and 0's in 1000yr. The OP said nothing about humans (the *robots* use the software during the 1000 yrs), or why the facility needed to be autonomous for 1000yr. If it does, one might assume that there are times during that period where interest is sufficient to copy to new or better media. If the facility's tech can be modified per outside developments, does it still qualify as autonomous? I still have files that have survived five generations of media tech. Did you keep the machinery to read them, too? Mark L. Fergerson |
#89
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1000 year data storage for autonomous robotic facility
" wrote in message ... On May 6, 3:40 pm, Clifford Heath wrote: On 05/06/13 12:16, wrote: On May 5, 6:33 pm, wrote: In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage wrote: For some reason, there are a lot of people with big egos and low itelligence that want to believe these marketing lies. Never ceases to amaze me. It is also fascinating that the most significant (and well-known in the data archival community) problem is blatantly ignored: The equipment for reading the storage devices needs to survive as well and the software for processing it and hardware it runs on too. That means this hardware has to stay in production, as these components will have a shelf-life well below 30 years. I made the assumption that the robots themselves would be the "read hardware" All this prompts the question of whether human culture will last, to the point that anyone will care about decoding 1's and 0's in 1000yr. The OP said nothing about humans He did however imply that there would be humans around in the future to thaw him out and upload the contents of his head. He wasn't proposing that his robots do that. (the *robots* use the software during the 1000 yrs), or why the facility needed to be autonomous for 1000yr. He did say that later, essentially he believes that that's the most likely way to ensure that his frozen head will still be around in 1000 years for the humans that that have worked out how to upload the contents to do that. If it does, one might assume that there are times during that period where interest is sufficient to copy to new or better media. If the facility's tech can be modified per outside developments, does it still qualify as autonomous? Yes, if it can operate by itself. I still have files that have survived five generations of media tech. Did you keep the machinery to read them, too? You don't need to if you have multiple generations, you only need to keep the machinery for the latest generation. |
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