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from the back-to-clay-tablets-are-we? dept.
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: 5, Insightful) by aclarke on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:59PM
I'm a little disappointed in this community's response to this article. Here's basically a regular guy trying to do something good for humankind, that will last. All most of the commenters so far have been able to do is post snide comments about how his idea isn't perfect, or can't contain all human knowledge, etc. So what? This is one guy with a big idea, trying to do something with his life that's beyond the ordinary. Why is that something we have to scoff at?
Good for Mr. Kunze. He's not going to get "all human knowledge", but if his efforts last a few millennia (and if humans do), if this trove is ever dug up it could prove invaluable. That's a lot of ifs, but at least he's trying to do something special.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 19 2017, @04:15PM
Welcome to modern America. What you're observing shows why our culture and civilization is self-destructing. If humanity is lucky, other nations will survive the impending disaster, and rebuild.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:46PM
Not thinking far enough. If humanity is lucky, there won't be any nations, and all humans are hybrid, many-shaped things, containing plant, man and machine parts... Which would remove the need to rebuild anything ever and the need to have external data storage?