The Long Now

The Long Now is a very cool organization "...seek(ing) to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. With people like Danny Hillis at the helm, their goal is realistic and doable. To that end, they are designing a clock designed to last 10,000 years give or take a few millennia.

But there's a problem retaining civilization's data, digital storage doesn't last 10,000 years in any way, shape or form. On the outside, CD's might go for 30 while 100 years might be possible in the right storage environment but 10,000? No way and DVD's and hard disks are worse but there is a solution on the horizon if Penn State's tech works.

" Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.

This new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data and even download entertainment as consumers,” Agarwal said. “This represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.”

And the beat goes on...