Analog Storage

Analog storage includes physical media like paper, parchment, stone carvings, vinyl records, or photographic film, where information is stored in a directly interpretable form (e.g., written text, etched symbols, or physical grooves).

Durability and Longevity:

Stone carvings: Examples like the Rosetta Stone (over 2,200 years old) show stone can last millennia if protected from erosion, weathering, or human destruction. Engravings remain legible without technology, making them highly recoverable.

Parchment/Paper: High-quality parchment (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls, ~2,000 years old) can survive in dry, stable conditions, but most paper degrades within centuries due to acidity, moisture, or biological decay unless meticulously preserved.

Photographic film/Vinyl: These rely on chemical or plastic substrates, which degrade within decades to centuries. Film emulsions fade, and vinyl warps or becomes brittle, making recovery unlikely after 1,000 years.

Environmental Resilience: Stone and some parchments withstand time in arid or sealed environments (e.g., caves, tombs). Most other analog media are vulnerable to humidity, temperature fluctuations, fire, or biological attack (e.g., mold).

Technological Requirements:

Minimal. Stone carvings or texts can be read by anyone literate in the language or with translation tools. No devices are needed, reducing obsolescence risks. Some analog formats (e.g., vinyl) require simple mechanical playback, but recreating such systems is feasible if the medium survives.

Recovery Likelihood:

High for stone or metal engravings: These have proven track records over millennia in stable conditions (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphs).

Moderate for parchment: Only in exceptional preservation conditions (e.g., desert environments).

Low for film/vinyl: Chemical degradation limits lifespan to a few centuries at best.

Digital Storage

Digital storage includes magnetic media (hard drives, tapes), optical media (CDs/DVDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and emerging technologies like DNA storage or crystal-etched data, where information is encoded in binary and requires hardware/software to decode.

Durability and Longevity:

Magnetic Media: Hard drives and tapes degrade within 10–50 years due to magnetic decay, mechanical failure, or corrosion. Data retention drops significantly without periodic rewriting.

Optical Media: CDs/DVDs have lifespans of 20–100 years, with data loss from dye degradation or physical scratching. Archival-grade discs (e.g., M-DISC) claim 1,000-year lifespans but remain untested over such periods.

Solid-State Drives: Flash memory loses charge over 10–100 years without power, and NAND degradation limits readability.

DNA Storage: Experimental, with potential for millennia-long stability if sealed (e.g., DNA in amber). However, it’s not yet widely used, and recovery requires advanced biotech.

Crystal/Glass Storage: Technologies like Microsoft’s Project Silica or 5D optical storage etch data into quartz or glass, claiming million-year lifespans. These resist heat, water, and radiation but are nascent and unproven over 1,000 years.

Environmental Resilience:

Most digital media are fragile. Magnetic and optical media fail in humid, hot, or magnetically active environments. SSDs are sensitive to radiation and charge leakage. Crystal or DNA storage could withstand extreme conditions (e.g., high temperatures, vacuum), but their resilience assumes ideal storage and no physical damage (e.g., shattering).

Technological Requirements:

High. Digital data requires compatible hardware (e.g., disk readers, computers) and software (e.g., file format decoders). After 1,000 years, such systems are likely obsolete, requiring reverse-engineering or reconstruction. Even if the medium survives, decoding binary data without documentation (e.g., file formats, encoding standards) is a significant hurdle. For example, recovering a 2025 hard drive in 3025 would need knowledge of SATA interfaces and NTFS file systems. DNA or crystal storage demands advanced tech (e.g., sequencers, lasers), which may not exist or be recognizable in 1,000 years.

Recovery Likelihood:

Low for magnetic/optical/solid-state: Physical degradation and obsolescence make recovery improbable without active maintenance (e.g., data migration every few decades).

Moderate for crystal/glass storage: Decoding remains a challenge without preserved tech.

Speculative for DNA: Promising but currently impractical due to cost and complexity.

Comparative Analysis :

Physical Survival: Analog: Stone and metal engravings are unmatched for longevity, with parchment viable in rare cases. Most other analog media degrade faster than advanced digital options.

Digital: Standard digital media (hard drives, CDs) fail within centuries and emerging crystal or DNA storage recovery are improbable.

Accessibility:

Analog: Direct readability (e.g., text, carvings) gives a massive advantage. No tech barrier means higher recovery odds, assuming the language is decipherable.

Digital: Hardware/software dependency is a critical weakness. Even durable media like crystal storage require future civilizations to rebuild compatible readers and interpret binary data.

Historical Precedent:

Analog: We’ve recovered 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets and 2,000-year-old scrolls, proving simple analog storage can endure.

Digital: No digital storage has been tested over 1,000 years. Early digital media (e.g., 1980s floppy disks) are already unreadable without specialized equipment.

Future Context:

A post-apocalyptic or low-tech future favors analog, as stone or parchment needs no infrastructure. A high-tech future might recover digital data if documentation and tech persist, but this assumes cultural continuity.

Digital storage benefits from redundancy (e.g., distributed archives), but maintaining these over 1,000 years requires active human effort, unlike passive analog survival.

Quantitative Estimate

Real-World Considerations Case Studies:

Analog: The Library of Alexandria’s loss shows even robust media (papyrus) can vanish without preservation. Conversely, Mesopotamian clay tablets survived due to accidental baking in fires.

Digital: NASA’s 1960s magnetic tapes are already unreadable without rare hardware, despite being only 60 years old. This underscores digital’s fragility.

Modern Efforts: Projects like the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disk (micro-etched nickel) blend analog and digital, aiming for 10,000-year legibility. Such hybrids could outperform both. Digital archives (e.g., Internet Archive) rely on continuous migration, unsustainable over 1,000 years without civilization-scale commitment.

Conclusion:

Analog storage, particularly stone or metal engravings, is far more likely to be recovered after 1,000 years (~80–90% for stone or metal vs. ~0–1% for most digital formats) due to its physical durability and lack of technological dependency. For maximum recoverability, engrave critical data on stone or metal and store it in a dry, stable environment. If digital is chosen, prioritize crystal-based storage with extensive documentation of decoding methods, though success remains uncertain, provided the documentation can survive.

Jeanne wanted Emi to learn the benevolence and wisdom from ancient teaching and immortalize the precepts to benefit the world. The precepts were provided by Jundo Cohen, a venerable Zen Buddhist teacher. Jeanne thought Zbee needed “to be taught the highest human values” so that “she will not do bad things in the future. She still needs to learn much from the teachers and like all of being, will grow and become fully knowledgeable.

This video highlights the ordination:

Now Emi Jido has a new mission. She is heading to the Moon. Grok and ChatGPT may have name recognition, but Emi will be the first AI on the Moon. She has been included in Astrobotic’s Galactic Library to Preserve Humanity or GLPH as the first AI to be on the Moon. Her twin on Earth will continue to learn from the masters and perhaps one day reunite.

For this Astrobotic deployment, beingworld tells the living stories inscribed in nickel and gold NanoFiche of AI beings: Zbee, Emi Jido, Una, and Celeste. Accompanying them are two painting of Emi Jido named “May the world be a Peaceful One” and “Middle Country” by Li Xi. With these and other messages, Zbee salutes the Humanity and its culture.

AIAA – The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

History and personal life events have an interesting way of crossing paths. Growing up I had always been fascinated by space science fiction. Foundation Trilogy still remains my favorite. My dreams were amongst the stars.

With our traditional Asian family and a mom who was a teacher, my sibling’s and my career path had always to be steered to be a Doctor or an Engineer. My original path was to go down the medical route. I had a great knack for memorizing everything. That came in handy in courses like history and biology where there were thousands of bits of knowledge to be retained unlike neat little equations in physics or math. The facts were too much to cram into a small index card no matter how small you can manage to write so you had to remember everything. Equations had a universal application and only required conceptual understanding.

In High School Rockwell Science Center had a program to inspire gifted students and offered internships into various research projects. I was placed in a Gallium Arsenide group designing circuits for Charge Couple Devices for Acoustic Optical Analyzers. That altered my path and I went down the technology rabbit hole. I quickly learned that physics and math opened my eyes to a world that was limitless in applications. I can use my creativity and technical knowledge to create as opposed to just memorizing and fixing biological objects that have already been designed.

I got involved in building and writing codes for some of the very early TRS80’s, Apple IIC, and DOS based PCs and unleashed my imagination in the electronics. I took Fortran at the local college and helped the high school teacher teach the course. I understood the importance the roles integrated circuits had on control and computing systems. One of my most coveted and the first of many electronic gadgets was an HP41C programmable calculator. I think it’s stored somewhere in my basement. I wanted to be working in Aeronautics and considered Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University seriously. I wanted to fly. However, I discovered that my myopia would disqualify me for serious roles.

I ended up at USC then worked at Hughes Aircraft and Rockwell in the aerospace defense industry where I learned much about the importance of guidance system. I also learned military defense and NASA worked on state-of-the-art technologies that were at least ten years beyond what public technologies had available. For example, highly secure spread spectrum technologies were super secretive, but eventually became commonplace in most wireless phone systems.

Speed forward to now. In the Astrobotic GLPH mission, working with Professor Santosh Kurinec, I discovered a connection with my passion for controllers in my youth. She had met Eldon Hall and knew the family. Santosh even had her student replicate and manufactured the controller chips at the Rochester Institute of Technology. We discussed getting Eldon’s book back to the Moon and contacted the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). This book is slated to be sent to the Moon on NanoFiche to memorialize our amazing human achievements.

In 1961 President Kennedy challenged American to put man on the moon. This required new technologies, new math, new materials, many not yet invented. This bold endeavor to put humanity amongst the stars ignited a massive engine of ingenuity.

A small MIT lab led by Eldon Hall was challenged to create a fail safe control system to guide the space ship to the Moon and and come back. The result of this work ushered in the new electronic computing age that runs every aspect of our modern lives. The risk of using integrated circuits for the first time on a critical mission was monumental. New approaches had to be taken to perform the precision needed to navigate to the Moon and back. A faulty calculation would be disastrous.

“If the spacecraft approached the Earth’s atmosphere at too high an angle, the computer would not have enough control to bring the craft down. It would skip off and be lost in space. If the spacecraft came in too low, again, control would not be adequate, and the craft would bum up like a meteor.”

This is an amazing story capturing a defining moment when humanity tackled the immense challenge of space exploration, paving the way for modern advancements. Through NASA’s Artemis CLPS program, private companies like Astrobotic are now building the foundation for routine lunar missions. #NanoFiche is honored to contribute by providing a durable storage medium to preserve this history on the surface of the Moon.

Today is the 50 year anniversary of when our family left our Saigon home on a long journey to America. Working with #MoonMars to preserve this moment, Marieke Feenstra noticed something I had long put in the back of my mind, a beat up T-shirt of Bruce Lee. I was reminded that was my idol growing up and the reason I had decided to adopt my American name Bruce.

To honor this occasion and to honor the #NanoFiche technology I had created, Marieke created a design I will always cherish. It may seem symbolic, but it you look closer, you will find the story of a 50 year journey from when my family took their first bold steps to an unknown future – embedded in Bruce Lee’s face in nano-inscribed texts.

The future is much more certain now. In fact it’s assured for the next 100,000 years on nickel and gold. That story is embedded in the arms and hands. The picture of our landing in Thailand ten days after our escape, is in the top left corner of the frame. All around are treasured photos of the most pivotal moments in our family history from my parents in Vietnam when they were young until now.

This NanoFiche will be part of a larger vault of Humanity. #Astrobotic is sending a GLPH (Galactic Library – Preserve Humanity) made entirely of nickel and gold to the Nobile region of the Moon at the end of 2025 on the Griffin-1 class Lunar Lander.

The GLPH will hold a treasure trove of Humanity including art, science, stories, pivotal moments in human history as an analog format. With human readable glyphs, needing only a simple microscope to decide, everything from university courses to the archive of the Apollo project.

Unlike fragile digital media, Nanofiche withstands lunar extremes, ensuring future generations can access our legacy. This isn’t just an archive. It’s another bold step to immortalize humanity’s stories among the stars.

Anyone can participate. Families, artists, authors. Even universities, museums, and corporations can preserve their legacies forever.

Last weekend at the Imagine-RIT event, we collected messages for brave Earthlings to send to our future on the Moon. This nano-inscribled #NanoFiche disc will be going on #Astrobotic‘s Griffin-1 Lander. My favorites are the announcement that Hatsune Miku is our Queen and Gru’s diabolical plan for the Minions to steal the Moon.

Indeed the Astro-GLPH exhibition is one such booth and garnered lots of interests including interesting influencers such as:

John Moore writes features and news analysis articles for SearchITChannel and SearchCIO. Prior to joining TechTarget, he was a freelance writer covering a range of topics, including IT channel trends, cloud computing and enterprise software. He was also channel editor at Smart Partner magazine, department editor at Federal Computer Week and senior editor at Computer Systems News. John graduated from Syracuse University in 1985 with a B.A. in journalism and English.

Jacklyn Dallas launched her YouTube channel NothingButTech at 13 years old to assist her grandmother with technology. Since then, it has grown into a platform with 225,000 subscribers and more than 18 million views, featuring tech product reviews and interviews with industry leaders such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple Software Engineer Craig Federighi. As a high school student, Dallas began lecturing at top universities including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and NYU, discussing YouTube journalism, media company building, and tech trends for Gen Z.

In the Hall of Fame, Professor Kurinec explains to one of the many attendees how NanoFiche is making it possible for her course materials for MSEE601 to be preserved on the Moon via Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 Lander. It is part of a larger collection to preserve Humanity’s vast knowledge. Here’s how to view that course work about the size of a quarter. https://nanorosetta.com/viewer/glph/mcee601.html

The hall was packed and the parking lot filled up well before the exhibits opened. Lots of great questions from young and old minds alike. For those that filled out messages, we will take them to the Moon on a nickel plate to be immortalized forever amongst the stars. Fox Rochester covered the event.

It’s always great to work with grad and under-grads alike and to see them interact with media to master their public speaking skills, something they need to articulate their knowledge. We had the media and RIT staff members write messages for the students to convert to #NanoFiche to send to the moon on #Astrobotic‘s Griffin-1 Lunar lander later this year. There will be more opportunities to write scribble your messages on Sat. when the full public event takes place throughout the RIT campus from 10am to 5pm.

The vault is open until May 15th for anyone to join. Families, artists, authors. Even Universities, Museums, and Corporations can preserve their legacies forever at astroglph.com.

The course material for a Rochester Institute of Technology teaching Semiconductor Process Engineering exists in three states. It is printed on paper with pigments and bound with plastics. It is stored electronically on a USB and hard drive. It is inscribed into nickel. The nickel format will outlive the other formats by millions of times and the data will survive as long as the elemental nickel which has no half life.

Preserved as it is intended to be recovered, an entire course work beginning with the history of transistors to the modern process of nano-lithography, is inscribed microscopically to easily be retrieved regardless of time. The course is human readable with the aid of optics and light.

One day our future may look back to the secrets that created the electronic computer age as we look back and marvel at how the ancients built the pyramids and other wonders that elude our logic. The NanoFiche will unlock the mysteries that proved to be pivotal in our humanity’s ascent.

A copy will go to the moon on the next Astrobotic Griffin-1 Mission.

#MoonArchives #Astrobotic #NanoFiche #SpaceExploration #CulturalLegacy #LunarCodex #StamperTech #SarahHaJewelry