Durable Information for Durable Civilization

Nova Spivak, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation is working on ways to preserve large volumes of information about our society in extremely durable formats. Potential uses – passing on our history to future/alien civilizations or planting guides for rebooting our civilization around the solar system in case of a major apocalyptic event. Spivak is working with technology that allows the encoding of up 300+ terabytes of data on quartz discs that can last for millions or even billions of years.  Why it may be important – outside of the huge aspirational goals Spivak is pursuing, our increasingly digital civilization is more fragile than ever in important ways. As more of our information goes digital, it has shorter and shorter lifespans and is more dependent on specific technologies (floppy drives, anyone?) with short life spans to retrieve it. This potentially increases the fragility of our technology and may make it harder to recover from a future dark age.