The future of text and image archiving isn’t necessarily digital, at least in all cases. A new patented technology developed by Rochester, New York based Stamper Technologies, can store thousands of pages of text and images in a physically readable format that can be preserved for thousands of years on a tiny metal disc. “Physically readable” means that a human being, or perhaps some other life form in another galaxy, is able to discern the text with their eyes (or equivalent) aided only by magnification, such as that provided by a microscope.
Rochster, NY, based Stamper Technology, has a patented archival process they call NanoRosetta whereby large amounts of text can be microscopically etched onto a nickel disk. The concept of micro-etching is not new, but the company claims that their system can archive up to 50,000 pages of analog text or pictures onto a six-inch nickel disk 10,000 times faster than existing ion beam technology.
Bruce Ha, president of Stamper Technologies, recently announced an agreement with Santa Fe, NM, based Norsam Technologies to market this process commercially. Ha, who had a long career in the optical technology arena working on behalf of companies such as Kodak and Pioneer, has been granted no less than 10 US patents for his innovations. Ha says that “digital doesn’t mean archival,” and talks about this process as a real replacement for microfilm, a popular archival method used since the early days of photography that still houses much of our printed history from the last century.
The media produced through the NanoRosetta process can be considered “anti-digital” in the sense that it is actually a physical product, like microfilm . However, unlike microfilm, which is subject to short-term decay and is itself based on obsolete technology, documents stored on a nickel disc will last thousands of years and withstand heat up to 2,647° F.
The issue that this process addresses is the fact that because digital media is continually changing, there is absolutely no assurance that stored archived material would even be retrievable by future technologies. Furthermore, most of the media itself is subject to decomposition and failure over a relatively short period of time. While some scientists are addressing the need for a uniform protocol for “perpetual” digital storage, the fact that it would still be electronically encoded means that it would still not be retrievable in a scenario where there are simply no suitable devices or power sources available to accomplish that.
While microfilm replacement and perhaps applications for personal medical records present themselves as potential ready-to-go markets for NanoRosetta, the company takes seriously uses of this process more readily conceived in the context of science fiction, although not really implausible.
Some of these imagined scenarios include space exploration, where we Earthlings want to include readily viewable information about ourselves on an exploratory spacecraft bound to the outer edges of the galaxy. How would a light-years distant life form read all about us? Another scenario is the need to preserve warnings about radioactive waste burial sites that will remain toxic for centuries, a longer period than we can reasonably assume that compatible digital technology will exist. Add in the possibility of a catastrophic planetary event or nuclear war that may decimate our global base of knowledge and human continuity. Under that somewhat plausible view, the need for a long-enduring physical medium containing volumes of non-digitized information becomes even more compelling.