Re: [ARSCLIST] Longevity of data tape?--

[Gary Sprung <gary@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Hodge wrote:
> Sorry, but acid rain will reduce that life by at least 75%
> back to the drawing board.....
> Hold on to those original 78's and cylinders !!
> Bob Hodge

I'm afraid that long before any acid rain effects, the
"etched in stone" media would suffer the same failure
that the Egyptian pyramids did,"Sticky-finger Shed Syndrome",
due not to binder hydrolysis, but to local builders who
recycled the original mirror-polished limestone facing
into other projects, leaving only the base carrier, which
today we take for granite (sorry).  The lesson for us
is that the information should not be recorded on the
back-coating. The "oxide" layer of the pyramids is
inside, where the hieroglyphs are intact, albeit with
some loss of high frequencies.

> > I've been looking into this issue myself, and I've come to one
> conclusion.
> > Build giant pyramids - twice the size of the pyramids in Egypt, lots
> of
> them, and hand-etch into the stone the binary code of digital A/V
> files.
> GUARANTEED to be there 10,000 years from now, plus whatever
> civilization
> finds them will consider us far-sighted geniuses.
>
> Provided we also leave a bunch of "Rosetta stones" around...
>
> Karl

19th-century Egyptologists considered the pyramid builders
"far-sighted geniuses" and were quite excited when they discovered
that the pyramid base dimensions were all exact multiples of Pi,
to a precision that far-exceeded Archimedes' much later approximation.
They also marveled at the precision of the base leveling without
the use of modern optical instruments.
The excitement abated when 20th-century Egyptologists noticed
"construction drawing" hieroglyphs showing the builders' use of
wheels to measure distances and water-filled grooves in the base
rock for leveling.  The pyramid builders still deserve credit
for their far-sighted policy of multiple, off-site backups.
May we be so far-sighted!

Gary Sprung