The 10-million-year sapphire hard disk

A multidisciplinary team of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, artists, archivists, and linguists have put pen to paper and come up with the ultimate long-term storage solution: two 20cm (8in) sapphire disks, molecularly fused together, with a thin layer of inscribed platinum in between. The disk is expected to have a lifetime of 10 million years.

As you have probably assumed, this 10-million-year hard disk (well, it isvery hard, and it is a disk) has nothing to do with computers — rather, this is all about passing important messages to future archeologists. Complex storage devices such as flash drives are no good: There’s just no way of guaranteeing that a future human (or alien?) race will be able to decode the data. With the sapphire disk, up to 40,000 miniaturized pages of text or images can be inscribed in the platinum — and all you need to read the data is a microscope, which hopefully future civilizations will still have access to.

The basic need for such insanely durable storage solutions stems from our use of nuclear power. Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste that needs to be safely stored for up to 1 million years. A variety of solutions have been proposed — including my personal favorite: disposing waste near subduction zones, so the waste is carried into the core of the Earth — but none have yet been implemented. Once we finally choose a disposal method (mile-deep boreholes are likely to win), we need some way of warning future societies where we’ve buried the waste.

That’s where the sapphire disk comes in: In theory, once you’ve chosen a site to dump the radioactive waste, you would leave a lot of markers buried around the dump site, warning future archeologists and builders that they should stop digging. Until now, the plan has been to engrave warning signs in rocks or lumps of concrete — but this is a problem if the future civilization speaks a different language. With a sapphire disk, you could encode the warning message into every form of written human communication, including words, pictograms, and diagrams. This is why linguists and artists are involved in the project.