They wouldn't take up proportionally more space in etching than they do on screen. So an extra 10-20% overall. They would probably make the process a bit more expensive, but still to this scale. an illustrated encyclo may well be worth twice as much.
Let's see what the Rosetta folks have to say. I can think of a lot of people, not least those who have one of the early Rosetta disks, who would love an archival etched copy of Wikipedia + Commons thumbs, which might cover some of the early costs of trying this out. Håkon: perhaps PrinceXML would be useful for making an etch-specific layout? SJ On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 8:12 PM, geni <geni...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/5/5 Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com>: >> I'm splitting off a separate thread about long-term archiving. The >> original thread is important enough not to derail it. >> >> This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many >> different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation >> has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta >> Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts. >> Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline, >> robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy... >> [ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :) >> ] >> >> Kevin Kelly on long-term backups: >> http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/ >> The original y2k event: >> http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/ >> >> Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up >> good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent >> price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the >> [re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost >> knowledge. >> >> You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words >> of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel >> sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this >> laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in >> price. >> >> SJ > > High purity nickel would appear to run into the intrinsic value issue. > > The value of including thumbnails is complicated. On one hand it > solves the translation issue since near 3 million will illustrated > articles is unlikely to present a significant translation challenge to > any moderately advanced civilization. On the other hand they take up > more space than pure text. > > > > -- > geni > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l