Read an article last week on the Arch Mission Foundation project, which is a non-profit, organization that intends “to continuously preserve and disseminate human knowledge throughout time and space”.
The way I read this is they want to capture, preserve and replicate all mankind’s knowledge onto (semi-)permanent media and store this information at various locations around the globe and wherever we may go.
Interesting way to go about doing this. There are plenty of questions and considerations to capturing all of mankind’s knowledge.
Google’s way
Google has electronically scanned every book in a number of library partners to help provide a searchable database of literature, check out the Google Books Library Project.
There’s over 40 library partners around the globe and the intent of the project was to digitize their collections. The library partners can then provide access to their digital copies. Google will provide full access to books in the public domain and will provide search results for all the rest, with pointers as to where the books can be found in libraries, purchased and otherwise obtained.
Google Books can be searched at Google Books. Last I heard they had digitized over 30M books from their library partners, which is pretty impressive since the Library of Congress has around 37M books. Google Books is starting to scan magazines as well.
Arch’s way
The intent is to create Arch’s (pronounced Ark’s) that can last billions of years. The organization is funding R&D into long lived storage technologies.
Some of these technologies include:
- 5D laser optical data storage in quartz, I wrote about this before (see my 5D storage … post). Essentially, they are able to record two-tone scans of documents in transparent quartz that can last eons. Data is recorded in 5 dimensions, size of dot, polarity of dot and 3 layers of dot locations through the media. 5D media lasts for 1000s of years.
- Nickel ion-beam atomic scale storage, couldn’t find much on this online but we suppose this technology uses ion-beams to etch a nickel surface with nano-scale information.
- Molecular storage on DNA molecules, I wrote about this before as well (see my DNA as storage… post) but there’s been plenty of research on this more recently. A group from Padua, IT shows the way forward to use bacteria as a read/write head for DNA storage and there are claims that a gram of DNA could hold a ZB (zettabyte, 10**21 bytes) of data. For some reason Microsoft has been very active in researching this technology and plan to add it to Azure someday.
- Durable space based flash drives, couldn’t find anything on this technology but assume this is some variant of NAND storage optimized for long duration. Current NAND loses charge over time. Alternatively, this could be a version of other NVM storage, such as, MRAM, 3DX, ReRAM, Graphene Flash, and Memristor all of which I have written about
- Long duration DVD technology, this is sort of old school but there exists archive class WORM DVDs out and available on the market today, (see my post on M[illeniata]-Disc…).
- Quantum information storage, current quantum memory lifetimes don’t much over exceed 180 seconds, but this is storage not memory. Couldn’t find much else on this, but it might be referring to permanent data storage with light.
They seem technology agnostic but want something that will last forever.
But what knowledge do they plan to store
In Arch’s FAQ they talk about open data sets like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. But they have an interesting perspective on which knowledge to save. From an advanced future civilization perspective, they are probably not as interested in our science and technology but rather more interested in our history, art and culture.
They believe that science and technology should be roughly the same in every advanced civilization. But history, art and culture are going to be vastly different across different civilizations. As such, history, art and culture are uniquely valuable to some future version of ourselves or any other advanced scientific civilization.
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Arch intends to have multiple libraries positioned on the Earth, on the Moon and Mars over time. And they are actively looking for donations and participation (see link above).
Although, I agree that culture, art and history will be most beneficial to any advanced civilization. But there’s always a small but distinct probability that we may not continue to exist as an advanced scientific civilization. In that case, I would think, science and technology would also be needed to boot strap civilization.
To the Wikipedia, I would add GitHub, probably Google Books, and PLOS as well as any other publicly available scientific or humanities journals that available.
And don’t get me started on what format to record the data with. Needless to say, out-dated formats are going to be a major concern for anything but a 2D scan of information after about ten years or so.
In any case, humanity and universanity needs something like this.
Photo Credit(s): The Arch Mission Foundation web page
Google Books Library search on Republic results
A group of researchers at the University of Southhampton in the UK have 
