Preface.  My books “When Trucks Stop Running” and “Life after fossil fuels” explain why we are returning to wood as our major energy resource and for infrastructure, just like all civilizations before fossil fuels. I call it “Wood World”. The electric grid will come down, permanently. All the trillions of documents online will be lost.  So too will CDs — they can easily begin failing after only five years”.  Or a bit longer if stored at 41 F / 5 C and 30% humidity Salter (2019).

We ought to be preserving knowledge on metal, glass, or other materials that residents of Wood World can read, even if they don’t have the technology to record knowledge. It is probably only doable now while we have fossil fuels and precision machine tools and engineering.  Without an electric grid or computers in wood world, magnifying glasses and microscopes will have to suffice for future generations.

Below are projects I’ve run across to store knowledge, none of them suitable for Wood World.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Microsoft’s Project Silica: store data in glass blocks (Salter 2019, Nordrum 2020)

The advantage of Project Silica’s glass blocks is that there’s no plastic outer covering to wear off as there is with CD, DVD or Blu-Ray, and there’s no magnetic medium to physically lose from the surface of a tape or hard disk.  Silica is expected to survive for thousands of years in nearly any temperature, humidity, and chemical environment—it’s literally just glass, and the physical and chemical properties of glass are extremely well understood.

But…clearly this is not a way to store knowledge for life after fossil fuel, Wood World will not be able to read the glass: “Reading data from the glass is a drawback of this method. Researchers shine different kinds of polarized light—in which light waves all oscillate in the same direction, rather than every which way—onto specific voxels. They capture the results with a camera. Then, machine-learning algorithms analyze those images and translate their measurements into data”

Nor will Wood World be able to store data this way: “The storage medium is a block of high-purity glass, which has voxels (3D pixels) etched into it with femtosecond lasers. Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass. It is not something you have in your house to read or play movies, it is meant to store massive amounts of zettabytes (10²¹) of cloud data.

“The writing process is hard to make reliable and repeatable, and [it’s hard] to minimize the time it takes to create a voxel,” says Rowstron. “The read process has been a challenge in figuring out how to read the data from the glass using the minimum signal possible from the glass.”

REFERENCES

Nordrum A (2020) Lasers Write Data Into Glass. Microsoft’s Project Silica is one of several efforts underway to make it practical to store huge amounts of data in glass. IEEE Spectrum.

Salter J (2019) Microsoft’s Project Silica offers robust thousand-year storage. Project Silica extends storage reliability goals from “decades” to “centuries.” Arstechnica.