Above is the first known image ever taken from space and our first image of the really ‘big here’. It was shot from a captured German V2 rocket launched after WWII from White Sands missile range. You can find more about the effort in this excellent article in Air & Space magazine (also a link to this really amazing panorama). While it feels like space imagery is something fairly new because of new tools like Google Earth, this hauntingly grainy black and white image taken over 60 years ago reminds me that the intelligence community has been seeing and using this data for a long time. Also worth noting is that while we have this first image, it is my understanding that NASA is missing a large amounts of the early satellite data due to digital data loss. This is a good case where a real film camera has helped preserve the data.

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I have been following this interesting space craft-gone-long-term-science experiment for a while. Since being launched 1972 and 1973 the Pioneer 10 & 11 doppler based location measurements have drifted off their predicted paths . This is known as the Pioneer Anomaly and may tell us something new about physics and gravity once understood. There are some recent efforts to understand this anomaly with terrestrial based processing power (also see note below on the file format issue), and some have discussed a whole new mission around solving it. Some more links below…

• New Scientist
  • “Slava Turyshev of NASA has been compiling additional data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that had been unavailable because they were in archaic file formats and storage media.”
• Physics World

UPDATE:  Looks like Turyshev’s data has yielded some interesting results that blames the uneven heating of the spacecraft for it’s drift off course.

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In the recent New Yorker is an excellent article by Grafton on creating the Universal Library with our modern digital tools. (sent in by Long Now member Bryan Campen) Most interesting is its historical survey of the universal library idea, which reminded me of Alex Wright’s work. The article shows how fraught with pitfalls this idea is and does a good job of teasing out which of those perils may or may not be helped by the mass digitization and web accessibility of data.

The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

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Peter Paul Rubens’s copy of a copy of Da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari

I just received this update on the lost Davinci painting The Battle of Anghiari from Davide Bocelli, a Long Now member and long time friend of the Foundation in Italy… This is a good reminder how difficult it can be to preserve one of the great masterpieces in the world (done in a very permanent media). Imagine if the Da Vinci of our time is working in electronic media…

I just found the news that in Florence some researchers from the San Diego University will work next year to discover a secret fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. The masterpiece was covered by the Medici that hated the subject, but Vasari - ordered to cover the painting - decided to protect and not to delete Leonardo’s work. He left also a suggestion for the future researchers “Cerca Trova” (Search and Find - kind of time googling?? :) ) written on a flag inside the new covering fresco.

After 32 years of researche and thanks to new technologies, we could be the first generation after centuries to see one of the most impressive, copied and forgotten pieces by Leonardo.

Links
[IT] La Repubblica Article in Italian
[EN] Wikipedia entry in English
Just one year to wait.

Best,
Davide

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DVDs don’t. Tape doesn’t. Paper won’t. But rock does. In fact carved rock is about the only medium we have that might last 100,000 years. Most of our current electronic media will hardly last several decades. You need to continuously migrate info from one platform to the next as the current platform crumbles beneath you.

The first enthusiasms for a new electronic platform hint that perhaps “self-assembling nanowire of germanium antimony telluride” may have a working life of 100,000 years. According to this report in Physorg, this new nanoscale memory material is not only extremely small but also extremely durable. (The original work was published in the October 2007 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which is not online yet.)

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.”

(This picture is of a different self-assembling nano circuit by IBM.)

We’ve heard that last claim before. But even if this memory would remain intact for 1,000 years, it would be a revolution in digital preservation.

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In today’s New York Times is an article explaining how they are going to open their archives and web site up - sort of. It is indeed great they are taking away the requirement of logging in to see articles, and they are allowing free access to the “TimeSelect” service (previously $8/month).

The most interesting part however is this note:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.

They put this out there like it does not require any explanation. As though no one might care about what happened between 01922-01987. I would think that the time frame encompassing such events as Prohibition, The Great Depression, World War II, and the conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam might be worth at least a footnote.

I would venture that what happened was Steamboat Willie. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in the twenties, and therefore the de-facto line in the sand drawn through our culture, from which Disney will never allow Mickey (and by default, anything else) to fall out of copyright. The Disney copyright lobby has done much to keep copyright increasing by more than one year - per year, in order to keep its “intellectual” property safely in their hands.  While I am certainly fine with Disney continuing their reign over the little mouse, depriving the rest of us of works of great cultural value, such as 62 years of The New York Times, during some of the most formative years of our nation seems a bit out of whack.

I would assume that after 01987 The New York Times is able to attribute all its work and photos in accordance with modern copyright laws, and therefore are able to offer that (which is actually no small feat). But for the 62 years of unsharable data, there is apparently no good solution. The question that this begs in my mind is… What is more valuable to our culture? An make believe mouse, or 62 years of The New York Times?

This 62 year copyright gap does a nice job of pointing out where our intellectual property laws have become so onerous, that a large and venerable institution such as The New York Times simply cannot clear the rights in their own archive. Much smaller groups and individuals are in an even worse bind, we have lost great pieces of cultural history to this problem such as “Eyes on the Prize“.

I wonder what people will think about this time far into the future? A dark ages — not created by war, famine, depression, or even technological failure, but a small whistling mouse.

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The BBC is reporting on a new super bright x-ray source called a “Diamond Synchotron” (yes really) that could be used to view previously unreadable ancient texts. The synchotron could even be used to finish reading the parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have yet to even be unrolled due to their fragility.

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In today’s New York Times, author Timothy Ferris writes an ode to the multi-media disc of human activity that was sent into the cosmos on the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Despite the harsh — though stable — conditions in space, Ferris, who produced the gold plated disc, believes this record will last one billion years. If he is correct, this tiny disc could be the human artifact with the greatest longevity every produced.

If all continues to go well, Voyager should pierce the heliosphere’s outer skin by around 2015. It will then depart into the void of interstellar space, where it is destined to wander among the stars forever. The information etched into the grooves of the Voyager record is expected to last at least one billion years. That’s a long time: A billion years ago, life on Earth was first venturing forth from the seas.

Mindful of this mind-boggling fact, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake persuaded NASA to attach a gold-plated phonograph record to each of the Voyager spacecraft. Containing photographs, natural sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from all over our world, the record was intended to preserve something of human culture beyond what an intelligent extraterrestrial, encountering the craft at some far-distant time and place, might infer from the spacecraft itself.

The information etched into the grooves of the Voyager record is expected to last at least one billion years. That’s a long time: A billion years ago, life on Earth was first venturing forth from the seas.

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Some good news for data that wants to last beyond the next version of Microsoft Office…  The recent International Standards Organization (ISO) vote on whether to adopt Microsoft’s “Open XML” file format as a standard has narrowly failed for now.  In part they failed due to questions about the long term viability of a format controlled by one company:

Microsoft has also faced resistance from some government bodies worried that by storing documents in the Office format, they’ll be forever locked in to buying Microsoft software to decode them. Microsoft has pressed for the new format’s acceptance as a open standard in part to defuse these concerns.  - WSJ

It is good to see governments veering off a privately controlled file format standard, albeit for near-term economic reasons.  It is most interesting that (at least in the quoted article) no concerns were raised about the much longer horizon of government data, and that in fact Microsoft may not always be around to support it at any cost.

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A silica glass DVD will be traveling on the soon to be launched Phoenix Mission to Mars. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will add to the lineage of data lost on Mars:

What would a Martian traveler find on the disk? Assuming that he or she could figure out how to decode the DVD, the “library” would yield 80 forward-looking stories and articles -Cosmic Log

And there is the rub… “Assuming that he or she could figure out how to decode the DVD”. Its interesting that even though within my lifetime we have moved from 8-track, to 4-track, to CD, to DVD, and now to HD DVD (sort of), that we are launching something that requires a hi-tech, and very opaque technology to play. We can only hope that they did not use any copy protection to further encrypt the data.

We seem to be stepping backward from the wonderful Voyager Record which included directions on how to make a record player. Ironically, of all the formats, an LP record is the only one that I have been able to play continuously throughout my life.

There is more detail on Visions of Mars and the contents of the DVD here.

Full disclosure: Long Now has its own text based disk of space debris on its way to a comet via the ESAs Rosetta Mission.

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