That's why it's mostly nickel.

Their FAQ still warns about scratches & how you have to use a micro-fiber cloth. I would think there would be some sort of metal you can both engrave very precisely but also not have to worry about it scratching like my eyeglasses.

Or else put a layer of plastic on the surface more permanent than your standard floppy lcd screen throwaway.

You could make it out of tungsten, but it'd be heavy, brittle, and an absolute bastard to machine. It'd probably increase the breakeven cost by an order of magnitude.

For protecting the surface finish of the gold, you'd probably want something like the polycarbonate cases you sometimes see used for rare or precious coins.

elementary school chem: gold is the least reactive metal

and most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold

> most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold

That is a bold statement. Meusums are filled with non-gold artifacts!

yeah this seems to be ignore the massive amount or pottery and ceramics we have.

> and most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold

Pretty sure stone wins by volume.

Encode your data in pyramids! Presence of a pyramid = 1, absence = 0. Hope the data format still makes sense in 8000 years!

Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, Moore's Law extrapolated backwards in time would be vastly more expensive than this.

We might get 10^14 more bits out of something that costs 10^-7 as much today, but that's only 21 orders of magnitude out of a suggested 1200 or so.

The universe only has 10^50 tons of mass, so it's meaningless to even attempt to describe what would that cost would look like.

I'm personally saving up to buy a bit of storage when it only costs a thousand universes or so.

Moore's Law says nothing about "bits stored" or "cost" of storage, and it makes no sense to extrapolate it before the invention of integrated circuits.

It's actually quite interesting to extrapolate our current exponential trends before ICs as a thought experiment. Kurzweil semi famously uses it to push his arguments: https://www.kurzweilai.net/ask-ray-the-future-of-moores-law

I do know what Moore's Law literally says. I thought it was fairly obvious I was generalizing, but yes the text as written is incorrect.

If you're not into the thought experiment, that's totally fine.

Encode your data in a QR code made of pyramids. Future generations can find out what it says once they reinvent smartphones and travel to LEO.

And then: “never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down…”

There's like so many kinds of pyramids we can definitely encode more bits with sphinx's and stuff.

> gold is the least reactive metal

Platinum I believe beats it. But it is rare to find in antiquity because of the high melting point.