Hard drive for a million years

The speed of obsolescence of data storage formats is extremely high - now only used floppy drives are not needed by anyone and go to musical instruments . One can only sympathize with the builders of nuclear waste storage facilities: they need to keep records about what and where they are buried, not for years, but for tens of millennia.

Patrick Charton of the French Nuclear Waste Management Department ANDRA presented one of the possible solutions to this problem: a sapphire disk on which information is engraved with platinum. The purpose of the device is to provide information for archaeologists of the future. The cost of the prototype was 25 thousand euros, but Charton assures that he will live a million years. However, he is not sure in what language to write the data.
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Most countries with nuclear power plants agreed that the solution to the problem of burial grounds is to store waste deep underground, about 500 meters below the surface. Finland, France and Sweden advanced the farthest in the process of finding a suitable site. For example, the Swedish company SKB has spent 30 years only to find a suitable place and is now awaiting permission from the authorities to start digging. It is planned to begin loading waste in a decade.

However, the most uncontrollable process is time: one cannot be sure that future generations will not forget the location of the burial grounds, and will not start digging in these places. Archaeologist Korenilus Holtorf from the University of Linnea in Sweden showed a warning attempt: a 1-meter-wide stone in which the large words “Attention is not to dig” are carved in English and a smaller text explains the disposal of nuclear waste. But who knows what language our descendants will use, how will they think, and will they be people at all? Holtorf notes that despite the warnings about the inadmissibility of the excavation of the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, sarcophagi were stolen by the next generation.

In 2010, ANDRA launched a project designed to solve these problems. Specialists from a wide range of fields are working on it: materials scientists, archivologists, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and even artists - “to see if they had answers to our questions.” Initially, all possible options are considered, and by 2014–15 it is planned to narrow the range of possible solutions. However, they have enough time to find a solution: most likely, the repositories will not be filled until the end of the century.

The drive from industrial sapphire is just one of the results of these searches. It is made of two thin disks and has a diameter of 20 centimeters. Text or images are etched on platinum on one side - 40 thousand miniature pages that archaeologists of the future will read through a microscope. Then both halves are fused. The prototype was tested with an acid to test its resistance to aging. Charton hopes for a life span of 10 million years.
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