Stone tablets are the gold standard in the most stable storage dept. They can support arbitrary information encodings including text and binary and satisfy the < 1 GB, > 30 years criteria.
Baked clay is likely superior. Ceramics have fewer impurities that stone has that would cause data loss from standard things like erosion. Much of the oldest preserved writing is preserved on ceramics.
For another expensive approach, I suspect gold, like the gold voyager record would surpass it.
I imagine you could encode a lot of data in something like a QR code stamped in clay.
The oldest surviving tablets are stone tablets, so as a stone tablet marketing guy I'll have to say that clay is still relatively unproven technology. (A more hasty experimentalist might conclude that it is proven - to be less durable than stone)
As a titanium engraving marketing guy, I'd argue that my technology is younger and even less proven than ceramics, but I'm going to bet it's more durable than engraving in stone.
The technology is probably superior, but there's a conceptual flaw that is titanium being a valuable material. This results in a risk that data gets erased and the carrier material turned into jewellery, prosthetics or other funky stuff.
Clay tablets were often wiped and re-used. A lot of the ones we have preserved were preserved because the buildings used for storage burnt down, hardening the clay tablets and preserving the writings.
The stone or ceramic tablets are fragile, so they can break.
Bronze tablets will not break. Unlike stone or ceramic, they are slowly corroded, but we have well preserved bronze tablets which have survived at least 2200 years.
A bronze tablet, or better a stainless steel sheet, can be engraved with text using a computer-controlled mill.
I'd go with granite. But environmental conditions are just as important on longer time scales: humidity, temperature, acidity, biochemistry, etc.
Then again, selecting a physical carrier isn't going to ensure the longevity of data stored.
Far more poignant are questions whether data on those stone tables will be readable, let alone understandable. Ultimately, those tables will contain marks that - to us - signify 1's and 0's. If you want data to outlive us for just a couple of millennia, anyone far down the future will need to figure out which numerical system is used first. Then they have to understand the concept of binary representation of information. And then they have to understand the encoding.
Ironically, a JPEG picture of a cave painting stored on a stone tablet, is still far more brittle compared to actual cave paintings which lasted for tens of thousands of years.
Of course, other concerns such as curation and relevance of cultural objects stored as a digital representation also need to be factored in. Some stuff simply doesn't survive because later generations simply lose interest. The more time passes, the more longevity of objects solely hinges on simple happenstance and chance.
In fact, passing long-term information is a real life concern. Long term nuclear waste warning messages, for instance, have spawned the field of "nuclear semiotics".
In which you end up with these types of proposals:
> The linguist Thomas Sebeok was a member of the Bechtel working group. Building on earlier suggestions made by Alvin Weinberg and Arsen Darnay he proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts where members would be replaced through nominations by a council. Similar to the Catholic church — which has preserved and authorized its message for almost 2,000 years — the atomic priesthood would have to preserve the knowledge about locations and dangers of radioactive waste by creating rituals and myths. The priesthood would indicate off-limits areas and the consequences of disobedience
Meanwhile, there's Github's Archive Program which as this nice tidbit on it's roadmap:
> The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser.
Which sounds nice. But also unrealistic since technology alone isn't enough to ensure longevity. Embedding the longevity of data into culture could also involve founding a "digital priesthood" analoguous to Sebeok's "atomic priesthood". A group of people who safeguard and pass on the knowledge required to read and interpret artefacts containing digital representations of information.
What's the best way to encode the data though? I'm imagining QR codes. I'm guessing the DPI of any router that could do this would be pretty poor and limit your data storage though. Has anyone done it?
