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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @11:55PM
So yeah, it was definitely and only the Christians.
Agreed. I mean, who else would want to burn books? Seems like the Christian thing to do. Remember, God hates Flags, and Words, especially words in books.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday January 20 2017, @03:08AM
Good thing ISIS isn't running around destroying any history they don't like.
Oh wait
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"