[bassp]

I’m surprised that this piece mentioned Microsoft, but didn’t touch on Microsoft’s solution to this problem: project silica (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...), which stores data on etched pieces of quartz glass that are supposed to be able reliably store data for thousands a of years. Of course, you still need to solve the dispersal problem, and need to make sure that the knowledge of how to read the glass tablets is passed down, but hey, nothing’s perfect!

[simpaticoder]

It would be neat if they had a process for interactively "zooming in" on a given artifact with a suitably equipped human. For example, on the slab print human legible instructions for building a microscope. Then, when you look at the slab again with the microscope you built, there are more instructions on building a better microscope, a computer, and a decoding algorithm. This can continue, such that the N-1 level instructions allow the human read the artifact at Nth level density, unlocking further instructions, until you reach "bottom". I assume there are people expert in theory-crafting a message that self-teaches the language in which it is written. This also assumes there is no meaningful interaction of representations at different levels, or ones that can easily be accounted for.