Sapphire data storage made to store data for 1 million years

BySim75 (Simon Lane Photography)

In order to convey the storage location of nuclear waste to the later generations, we developed a storage that can store data for a very long time of one million years.

A Million-Year Hard Disk - ScienceNOW
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/a-million-year-hard-disk.html

Needless to say an example of Sony's memory stick, the specification of the recording medium is intense. This is a problem for those who have to build a high level radioactive waste storage facility and record that information for tens of thousands of years. Therefore, Patrick Charton who works for French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA has developed a special sapphire disk that can store data for a long time.

Speaking of sapphire, we tend to imagine a blue shining gem attached to a ring or necklace, but this disc is sapphire made artificially.

ByKevin H.

This disk has a mechanism to engrave data on platinum on industrial sapphire and it can keep usable state for one million years. The cost of creating a prototype was about 25,000 euros (about 2.42 million yen).

Incidentally, industrial sapphire is like the following feeling, it is a glassy look that is different from jewelry.


However, it is not certain whether humanity exists if it is a million years away, and even if it exists it is a husband whose culture is totally different thing, so Charton said " I do not know at all what to write in. "

As a similar case, I hoped that the extraterrestrial intelligent life forms and human beings of the future will find and decode the Voyager explorer "Golden Records"Is known.


Attempts to build a facility for storing (discarding) radioactive waste by digging a hole of about 500 m underground have already been implemented in Finland, France and Sweden, and as soon as government approval gets down, It is expected to start. However, designers of these facilities are concerned that there is a danger that this reservoir will be destroyed and harmful substances will be brought out by "excavation" by "future archeologists". There is no guarantee that archaeologists of the future can understand this language even if it is written in English as "dangerous, not dig" in a lithograph with a width of 1 meter.

BySamat Jain

The world's first high-level radioactive waste treatment stratum located in Finland "Oncolo"The most worried thing is that scenarios where future intellectual creatures after the disappearance of the present human beings will enter the repository and radiation will leak out. Is it better to tell the warning that it is dangerous, but how?Problems facedIt is still struggling to solve the problem, it depicts what approach we tried to solve in documentary "Into Eternity" which was produced in Denmark in 2010.

Into Eternity - Trailer - YouTube


ANDRA aims to address these risks by gathering experts in a wide range of fields such as archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, linguists and others, and aiming to narrow down the approach that may be realized to Medo 2014, 15 years .

And this sapphire disc is one of the achievements. It is about 20 centimeters in size on this disc, and it is designed to write photos and text as fine etching. In the future it is necessary to read letters etc using a microscope to see this inside, strictly speaking it is different from things like PC hard disk. In addition, disks are being tested for acidity to test aged deterioration, and researchers are thinking that they want to realize a product life of about 10 million years.