We should carve important binary data into large granite mountains or planes with large indentations representing the 1s and 0s that will withstand tens of thousands of years of erosion.
Posted by Vast-Intention@reddit | CrazyIdeas | View on Reddit | 71 comments
So much of our digital information will be lost in decades from hard drive degradation and data purging so it would be a good idea to save some of the important stuff carved in granite in mile long strips. It could also have pictograms about how to read the data, similar to the voyager golden disc. Maybe one day our future ancestors or intelligent species could decipher it.
soundman32@reddit
Great, now you have 10 billion ones and zeros carved into a rockface. Whats the encoding? Are we using 7 bit ASCII? 32-bit UTF? PETscii? How will we tell these people in 1000 years how to decode it?
Abject-Job7825@reddit
This problem is already solved but the technology is probably only used in incredibly niche cases, it involves using a laser to embed data into glass, thick sheets of glass would be pretty resilient and since it's inside the glass the data is never lost.
What's more likely is that we forget about the data we should save because only a few people look into that past, and the data that's important that we didn't forget is already so widespread that it would make no sense to store even more of it.
Fluid-Let3373@reddit
For starters it's where do we carve them. the Oxford English Dictionary + just the text part of the English wiki need 51% of Mt Everests surface area, still leaves 49% for other important stuff. Problem is there erosion is going to make sections unreadable in 20-100 years. Granite blocks of the same surface area in the mid-west good for about 50,000 years.
We are talking 500 square km of carving. which is about the same as the human race across the world has done in the whole of history, and 60% of that is inscriptions on gravestones. We are talking a Kansas City sized area of carvings.
It would take 70,000 masons 30 years to carve it. This is going to cost about 1/4 $ trillion.
Corona21@reddit
What size are you carving? I saw a little keyring thing that had info in it in magnifying then microscopic size. They plan to make hundreds of thousands to last many hundreds if not thousands of years.
I feel like you could do basic instructions in small but visible text then keep reducing to microscopic level you could get a lot of info there.
Fluid-Let3373@reddit
Erosion is your enemy, the smaller you make your inscription the sooner the ravages of time remove it a "I" 25mm high and 5mm deep is needed to last 50k years in the midwest.
Corona21@reddit
I think it was some sort of medium that had a layer on top of it so it was embedded rather than a straight engraving. The idea would be if many survive in varying states you could piece many if them to build a picture of what they were all meant to say.
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
Robots powered by Ai can build it which may end up being the catalyst to human extinction which would ironically make the carvings serve their intended purpose.
WitsBlitz@reddit
Let's not handwave AI as a magic solution to all problems. Elon's robots can't even fold laundry well, and Sam's chatbot still struggles with the word "strawberry". We are nowhere near having armies of expert Mason robots.
pinkleftsock@reddit
Didn't we make some small codexes with all the most important information stored on them? I vaguely remember some small objects with writing so small that you need to use a microscope to read it.
ManufacturerNo9649@reddit
Glass is even better. No erosion issues.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w
Here we report an optical archival storage technology based on femtosecond laser direct writing in glass that addresses the practical demands of archival storage, which we call Silica. We achieve a data density of 1.59 Gbit mm−3 in 301 layers for a capacity of 4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass. The demonstrated write regimes enable a write throughput of 25.6 Mbit s−1 per beam, limited by the laser repetition rate, with an energy efficiency of 10.1 nJ per bit. Moreover, we extend the storage ability to borosilicate glass, offering a lower-cost medium and reduced writing and reading complexity. Accelerated ageing tests on written voxels in borosilicate suggest data lifetimes exceeding 10,000 years.
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
True however this is supposed be a large artifact that could last up to a million years or more. Small glass storage will get destroyed or will be a needle in a haystack for future civilizations to find. The glass storage is a good thing for shorter term storage with much much more information in it. I say do both
evanamd@reddit
How do you ensure it’s decodable? Even today, we have mutually exclusive ways of using binary to encode information. A big base 2 number by itself means the same as 42 by itself means
What information is so important to preserve that disfiguring the Earth is more plausible than just, updating stuff?
Like, we digitize paper books and film and vinyl every day. We can understand thousands-year-old texts because humans love keeping records
Like, what sci fi catastrophe are you imagining where humans forgot to write down society’s important things offline but are also capable of manually translating a barcode carved in stone?
ManufacturerNo9649@reddit
Take your point but you did say last tens of thousands of years not tens of millions of years in your post. Have you calculated the data density for a carved mountain data store?
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
Oh yeah, you are correct. I didn’t communicate it properly. I’m just a laymen so someone much smarter than me would have to figure out the details.
normallystrange85@reddit
Why would binary be better than any written language? They would still need to translate the data back into human language (for example English) then have to translate it to whatever their language is.
This is adding an unessesary level of complication.
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
The idea is that it would be the simplest shape that would last the longest amount of time due to erosion. Letters and hieroglyphs are more complicated and will become illegible much sooner.
John_Tacos@reddit
Why not Morse code?
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
That would be good for written text and take up less room than binary I think. I was thinking the binary could be for multiple formats including small pictures, videos and audio though. Maybe there isn’t enough room for that though, I am not a programmer.
shponglespore@reddit
Nothing takes less room than binary, assuming you're restricted to black and white (or high/low relief in a carving). That's why QR codes are binary.
evanamd@reddit
Nothing takes more room than binary, because you’re restricted to how easy it is to distinguish between two states.
Like, the binary number 1001 takes 4 symbols to write, whereas I can encode 9 in a single symbol. Hexadecimal and higher bases can do even more with less, as long as you can distinguish the pixels.
The old-style one-dimensional barcode is also binary. QR’s big advantage is a that it encodes a number in 2 dimensions, and that the “number” it creates has a specific format with built in error checking, so that you know if the number you see is the same one that was written
normallystrange85@reddit
Not shorter, but better.
If I want to write out a sentence, morse is shorter than binary. The longest character in morse I can find is 7 long (Ś) but mostly are shorter than 4 for common symbols (like e which is just a dot) while all binary characters are 8 long(assuming acii, and not some new way of storing binary).
BUT morse has some issues because it's really hard to do arbitrary data (e.g. it's hard-to-impossible to tell the difference between an "ae" (dot dash dot) and "R" (dot dash dot) in morse if it is just written without a third spacing character. Now in natural language speach that difficulty matters less- we can read the sentence and from context understand what is happening- and if someone is tapping it the cadence can help you determine what letters are being sent.
But computers can't really pick up on context easily and it's much easier to do fixed length binary for characters than try and parse out something like morse.
So it's not shorter but it is better for what we are doing since our theoretical archeologists are probably going to have an easier time figuring out a fixed length acii code than the variable length Morse code.
shponglespore@reddit
Morse has 63 total symbols. If you did a naive translation of Morse into a binary representation, you'd need 6 pixels per symbol, and of course you'd only get capital letters from the basic Latin alphabet. In Morse with actual dots and dashes, you would need at least two pixels for a dot and three for a dash, plus an additional white pixel for the space between symbols. The longest symbol is zero, which is five dashes, so you need 31 pixels to encode it. Double that if you want to put blank lines between lines of Morse code.
If you encode your data in UTF-8, you can represent every human language and a lot of supplementary symbols as well. It's based on bytes, so groups of eight pixels. Western languages only need one byte for almost every character. Other languages need more, with up to five bytes for some characters, but since we're comparing it to Morse code, I think assuming one byte per character is more than fair.
In binary, it's also a straightforward to use LZ encoding (the type of compression that zip files use). This will reduce the number of pixels you need by 60% to 80% for English language text, so if you use compressed UTF-8, you're looking at an average of two to three pixels per letter in the English portion of the text. That completely blows Morse code out of the water. The only letters in Morse that are that short are E and T, so basically binary gives you all human alphabets in the same number of pixels that it takes for Morse to give you just the letters E and T.
Megalocerus@reddit
Redundancy preserves info better when it is damaged. It's why human languages have features like gender and number agreement and special tenses.
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
Very interesting. Redundancy is very easy to overlook in the moment however it is so important in the long term.
OkDrag3967@reddit
I think another important question is: what do we consider to be important enough that we would want to communicate to this generation so far away?
BokChoyBaka@reddit
CatacombOfYarn@reddit
Is this a warning about radioactive waste?
BokChoyBaka@reddit
Yes it's a warning meant to survive as the longest surviving structure of mankind. It's intended to be interpreted after the English language is lost and all current languages.
The word radioactive is intentionally left out so that rock and spear future-cavemen won't be tempted to try and find "the great weapon of man's past", as that may be one of the last surviving words in the English language if it ended the world
CatacombOfYarn@reddit
Huh, bleak but well thought out.
TrueCrimeDocumentary@reddit
Not as bleak as being irresponsible and poisoning the entire planet whether it be through fossil fuel pollution or totally foreseeable radioactive contamination.
Magnum_force420@reddit
A good rickroll obviously
tumbleweed_farm@reddit
To indicate the importance of the data, the granite tablets should, of course, be installed on top of large stone turtles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi )
adsarelies@reddit
Rocks don't last as long as you think. The forces of erosion can erase that stuff.
John_Tacos@reddit
Mount Rushmore will still be recognizable in 60,000 years. Probably much longer
adsarelies@reddit
That mountain as a whole, probably. The binary data cut into the surface of the mountain as indentations likely won't survive.
John_Tacos@reddit
That specific type of rock erodes at one inch in 30,000 years.
Megalocerus@reddit
How deep are you etching it? But I'm wondering exactly what info you are preserving?
John_Tacos@reddit
Idk, I’m no OP
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
True but I got the idea when I was watching a YouTube video (VSauce I think) that said Mount Rushmore will be one of the last remaining artifacts from our society because it’s carved into solid granite which is extremely hard. True it won’t last forever but it would hopefully last longer than any other method of data keeping on earths surface.
Several redundancy versions could be made in various parts of the world because sometimes certain geological features hold information longer than others due to many unforeseen circumstances. This would also give a higher chance of it being discovered.
quipstickle@reddit
Bro this is literally literature.
TemperatureFinal5135@reddit
Bro just invented libraries chill
RyeOnTheRocksNH@reddit
Yep, 3 body problem series did this. It was only partially effective.
Marquar234@reddit
There is a partial archive built into Mount Rushmore. We could store stable books there.
adsarelies@reddit
There are actual digital archival systems (that cuts data into glass or encode it into DNA) that can last a long time. And we can efficiently store that stuff without the bulk of mt Rushmore
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
Very cool, I will research it. Thanks!
ginogon@reddit
Mountain collapses from plate movement or the sides erode = data loss
Vast-Intention@reddit (OP)
I forgot to add in the post that I think it should have many redundancies in various parts of the word. Then there is a higher chance one would survive and be found due to unforeseen geological events and also perhaps if all of the copies were found they could fill in the blanks by putting together all of the pieces they find.
quipstickle@reddit
Instead of binary we could invent some other symbols that are easier for humans to understand.
OkDrag3967@reddit
For a person in the future, I feel like hieroglyphs from the Egyptians would be easier to understand and decipher than the mess of scratches that our modern languages look like today.
LameBMX@reddit
yea.. it really took the Rosetta stone to be able to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Rakhered@reddit
Egyptian Heiroglyphs were phonetic, not pictographic - it's the same problem with fancier letters
ClacketyClackSend@reddit
What? Why do you think that? It's not like the Egyptian symbols are just pictures of the things they represent. They're just as, if not more, obscure than any other symbolic language.
DrachenDad@reddit
Hexadecimal?
quipstickle@reddit
Regex
gr4viton@reddit
No, he said easier for humans to understand.
DrachenDad@reddit
Maybe.
anastis@reddit
That also carry the same information in a much denser form
Gooniefarm@reddit
Probably easier to just engrave it on stainless steel.
shponglespore@reddit
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
bertona88@reddit
Google is already doing this incribing the data inside glass with fs laser
bertona88@reddit
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/project-silicas-advances-in-glass-storage-technology/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
bangbangracer@reddit
How do we determine what is important enough to do that? Erosion is one of the most powerful things we know. I think you are vastly overestimating the stability of stone.
octopus4488@reddit
I support this. Photos of young Jessica Alba must be preserved at all costs.
grafknives@reddit
And then, one day we would go on a journey.
Data readers would be the class of wondering clerics. Half mages, half cartographers, half data scientists.
they would walk and walk and walk to read a single byte of divine text.
And here are the teaching of the eldars.
OkDrag3967@reddit
These must’ve been the first words that AI uttered in the times of old.
SpecialFlutters@reddit
lets carve windows xp into the earths crust
BloodSteyn@reddit
Someone's been reading 3 Body Problem Trilogy.
Hitthereset@reddit
We had the Georgia Guidestones but they were defaced/destroyed a few years ago.
BrainyCaveman@reddit
We call it Rockipedia.
Arek_PL@reddit
I think merely printing it and sealing in tectonically stable underground vaults would be enough
Carving binary in granite would be durable, but it would either be a mysterious megalithic structure or detail would be lost to errosion fast
YonKro22@reddit
How about just one message that day and the rest of them much much smaller with an arrow pointing to them I'm not sure that's a good idea at all but no point in making miles of etchings and granite when you can make them like a million times smaller