Martin Kunze wants to gather a snapshot of all of human knowledge onto plates and bury it away in the world's oldest salt mine.
In Hallstatt, Austria, a picturesque village nestled into a lake-peppered region called Salzkammergut, Kunze has spent the past four years engraving images and text onto hand-sized clay squares. A ceramicist by trade, he believes the durability of the materials he plies gives them an as-yet unmatched ability to store information. Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it's emboldened by fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from earlier than 3000 B.C.E.
"The only thing that can threaten this kind of data carrier is a hammer," Kunze says.
[...] The goal of the project, which he calls the Memory of Mankind, is to build up a complete, unbiased picture of modern societies. The sheets will be stored along with the larger tablets in a vault 2 km inside Hallstatt's still-active salt mine. If all goes according to plan, the vault will naturally seal over the next few decades, ready for a curious future generation to open whenever it's deemed necessary.
To Kunze, this peculiar ambition is more than a courtesy to future generations. He believes the age of digital information has lulled people into a false sense that memories are forever preserved. If today's digital archives disappear—or, in Kunze's view, when they do—he wants to make sure there's a real, physical record to mark our era's place in history.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:19PM
bad: self destruct, or better, actively help satanic forces destroy your own civilization.
worse: make sure future civilizations know all details.
I say, leave the mt. rushmore thing standing, and call it a day.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @04:12PM
Why? What's wrong with at least giving future civilizations the chance to learn from our mistakes, if we don't learn ourselves?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:29PM
Maybe the Giant Cockroaches will be less selfish and self-destructive. But I'm not sure Evolution will ever correct that in humans.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:17PM
We should at least try.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:34PM
That still doesn't mean there's any harm in providing the information. In the worst case, it doesn't help. But it's not as if they'd come back to us with time machines in order to conquer us, right? (And if they'd do that, they can collect first-hand information using their time machines, so the provided information doesn't matter for that either).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.