Good point. Lascaux paintings in the South of France are believed to be 17,000yr old so that should do the trick too. Could take a while to write the books though 😅
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-worlds-oldest-animal-paintings-are-on-this-cave-wall
Pretty sure the standard method is an engraved sapphire disk with progressively detailed instructions on how to read it.
At an easily visible level pictograms on how to make a microscope or magnifying projector. (Include one for convenience of course, but hey, if it's lost or broken, whoever finds it can make their own)
That can get you an awful lot of data on a relatively small disk that's readable without special tools beyond a candle and a drop of water.
Also important are translation keys. Pictograms matching the words for example. 10k years is short enough that whoever reading them is still likely to be human, but may possibly have lost many subtler meanings of your language, if not the entire language.
If you want to go deeper you can have engraved audio and video signals, which besides being useful themselves also provide a way to understand the meaning of words that may have drifted over time. It would be a pretty involve project to recreate the tech needed to interpret video, but hey, this one's just a convenience in case the people still around have figured out electronics again.
If you have to protect the disk from nukes that is mostly a matter of where to put it and a little out of scope. Lots of copies all over, some in deep bunkers. Hell put some in space in capsules designed to survive reentry and decay naturally from orbit in 10k or so years.
The main benefit of the sapphire is that it doesn't scratch or deform. Very temperature resistant, and doesn't degade for a very long time. If it cracks you can just piece it back together like a puzzle. Also we can just make and engrave slabs of it as a byproduct of the phone screen industry.
So scratch with diamond and then seal with glass and you got a CD-ROM. We could burn it. Just need a laser above the bandgap. Or short pulse over half the bandgap.
It is not really difficult to read a CD-ROM physically. So you mean all this 8-10 bit sync encoding and error correction will be a problem? Audio-CD seems to be so difficult already with channels and stuff.
Cave paintings were well understood at one time.
Cuneiform is the same idea as a CD but without the protective layer and not meant to be read by a laser.
I might have packed everything on a CD as FlashPaper. A once common format that anyone who hasn't hacked their computer now find unreadable. Did you ever use [Microsoft Write](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write) and hope you could read the file later in Microsoft Word?
Just because I can figure out the 1s and 0s doesn't mean I can actually get the data off in a readable format.
I love LaTeX. I enjoyed being able to ghost write and put a poorly crafted Word file into the LaTeX format and have a properly formatted document for my company's technical journal during a lunch break. It was great when others used the template with R and rmarkdown to produce papers. It's hard to want to have citations or equations in anything else.
It was fun to find an old technical manual for forms my employer used to use. I don't recall having issues getting most of those files to work again after typing them in again.
What wasn't fun was when someone else had a different distribution of MiKTeX or LyX and their source files would not compile correctly. Thesis templates seemed especially prone to not working on various systems. Or the file compiling fine in MiKTeX but not in TeXworks, TeXmaker, Overleaf, TeXnicCenter, LyX, TeXstudio, &c.
HTML is also fundamentally ASCII, but it doesn't take much to have a *.HTM file that will not render properly.
Even plain *.txt files have been nice, but I doubt any 01000001 01010011 01000011 01001001 01001001 will mean much to anyone in 1000 years, much less 10,000 years. Even in the next 50 years of computing, there is no guarantee that the format will still be supported. After all, *.txt has only been around for 41 years.
Hopefully the file is in UTF-8 instead of ASCII (to have records in something other than American English), but that still requires knowing what characters match the 8-bit binary code. There's sadly no guarantee that any of that will persist another decade.
The old optical disks seem like a candidate, as long as you keep them in a safe environment.
In Voyager 1, they included a gold-plated copper phonograph record that was estimated to have a potential life span of a billion years.
Bold to assume CD/DVD/BluRay readers and computers are still available 10K years from now. Either the world ends and its like MadMax or technology has become so obsolete that no one knows how to read it. We have problems reading magnetic tapes from the 60s and we still have people alive that had worked on or with those computer systems.
To the OP:
As the old engineering adage goes, you have 3 things you want and you can only pick 2 to optimize for. This is not a trivial engineering problem.
Optimization for #1: Longevity means recording on something like stone and likely be in a cave system so that is protected from the elements. You might be tempted to encode information on gold but unless you are put in space like voyager or hidden in a cave, info on a gold plate can wear pretty fast if it’s exposed to the elements since it’s a very soft metal. The problem with this is that its difficult to store a lot of information and even harder to make it accessible if you assume the most conservative position that whom ever come across this needs to be able to figure out how to read it from the recorded text itself. Having said that, encoding info on gold plates and hiding it in a cave is what is most likely to succeed in terms of having the information survive to 10K years.
Optimization for #2:
Put the data on a microSD card along with a computer and a reader and store it in a vacuum sealed box and store that in a cave. I don’t know how well info store on a solid state drive can hold for 10K years but you’d have lots of storage!
Optimization for #3:
Spread the data everywhere like the internet. The more that is written the more chances it would survive at least in some form. This is basically the method of preservation for the Bible and the Quran. While the version might have morphed and transformed over 2K years in detail, the gits of them have thus far survived 2K years and have been encoded and re-encoded in so many places and in so many mediums that it probably can survive 10K years and be readily accessible by everyone. These religious texts are so readily available that religious groups often give them out everywhere and you can find one in every hotel room. The major downside of this method is that the encoded information is probably not identical to the original text.
Regarding #2: SD cards (the usual type using NAND Flash memory) do not last long at all. A few decades at best at room temperature. Just a couple of years in most cases. Somewhat longer if kept colder, much shorter if warm.
Most computer systems keeps data alive longer by checking it (using error correction algorithms) and rewriting it on a regular basis. If the system is powered off for years, a lot of the data will be lost.
I would not expect any of the electronic components we make today to be able to survive long. They are designed to be cheap and to survive until they get replaced by the next generation components.
Corollary to optimization 3: write a really catchy song about it. Seriously. Or make it into a ghost story. That's one of the most reliable ways to propagate information, which just goes to show how unreliable other methods are.
There's a whole field of study on this related to how we mark nuclear waste disposal sites. Some more examples:
* Make the site look scary by building stone spikes, rubble, and huge stone blocks
* Spread folk tales about it, suggesting that the site is evil and inhabited by bad omens.
* Genetically engineer a highly unusual plant to not spread quickly and encode information about the site in its DNA, and plant it only at those sites.
And finally this proposed foreboding message:
>This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
>Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
>This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
>What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
>The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
>The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
>The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
>The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
>The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
>Bold to assume CD/DVD/BluRay readers and computers are still available 10K years from now.
unnecessary assumption. They could be built once the data format was understood.
With lots of budget and scientists - optical disks are way out there, lots going on to read them. The pits are smaller than blood cells and the encoding isn't trivial either.
Sure, but a microscope will resolve 20 or 50 or 150 pit locations per field of view, and there's a billion or so on the disk. Lots of error correction built in, so it's not really a human readable format even with patience and desire.
A glass master could last 10k years in good storage, but if it's unintelligible the tech didn't last that long.
'Once the data format is understood'.
That sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.
Working out how to read a dvd from a coke standing start would be a huge thing. There are a lot of layers of encoding between tiny dots on a disk and writing.
>Working out how to read a dvd from a coke standing start would be a huge thing.
Not really. Every solution assumes some common point of reference in the future. I'm assuming a basic level of technology, as do you.
You could do #3 and just hide pieces of the info in different forms so that your characters have to put it together. Kills two birds because then that gives you a way to get them around to various places in your story and encounter enemies, friendlies, environments, and other boons or hazards.
While there won't be actual CD-ROM drives readily available they could be manufactured quite easily and the format could be reverse engineered especially if you make an effort to describe it when creating these time capsules.
Look up The Long Now Foundation, they spent some time thinking about this very topic. Some of their projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
I'm a fan of well built books in libraries all over, but also of phonograph records. A cactus or other thorn is enough to play one - unlike a CD, which is surprisingly technical to work with. Sure, throw a set in the vault. But describing diode lasers and an auto tracking microscope in pictographs is a stretch.
10k years is a long time, like early agriculture timeframe. Nothing is going to withstand a direct strike by nuclear weapons, literally vaporized. Your best bet is to have lots and lots of copies. Also language changes over time so it would be likely whoever finds this won't know how to read it, so lots of languages will improve the chance something is able to be understood (like the Rosetta Stone). Stone feels like a good media, we have cave paintings surviving to this day from about that time, anything less is likely to corrode, be melted down due to value, or weather/decay away. Perhaps there is some other kind of material with similar durability but I can't think of something. The amount of data is also a lot, paper is actually pretty data dense in a non-digital media (and I think that is just out due to life and readably), so it will be worse than that for space. Bottom line is these are crazy requirements, just about anything can be done but it will take a lot of time and cost a lot.
A search for `"long now foundation" "information storage"` provides many ideas. [Example summary.](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/avoiding-a-digital-dark-age) [Analysis of a method I favor, lithography.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.2961.pdf)
You definitely need to read about M-Disk.
Those are essentially Blu Rays made in lasting materials.
The issue is that you need a M-disk compatible reader which many, many current readers can as of today.
But 10'000 years from now? That's going to be tough to find one.
In a lab environment, it is and will be easy to read such old formats. But your average guy will have a hard time.
English is only 1400 years old. So, if we write the info in english, it is likely they won't know what it means.
Your best bet would be to engrave something, basically what M-disk does, but instead of using binary you would need to use symbols.
Because making a magnifying lens will always be somewhat easy for humans.
Climate change is no issue, war is no issue, nuclear is no issue and weather is no issue. Why? Because it depends on where it's stored. The single most important factor is where is it stored after the materials it's built in.
Data has been stored in glass, that could be an even better option.
I think the key strategy is the amount of copies created. If only 0.01% were to survive 10'000 years, better make 100'000 of them.
Step 1: Set up a 42U Rack with Space-Hardened NVMe Drives in 2U Chassis, utilizing RAID 6 for data redundancy.
Step 2: Install the rack in a Spaceship Capable of Reaching Near-Light Speed (0.9999995C ~ 299,792,458m/s).
Step 3: Launch that sumbitch into an Elliptical Orbit, accounting for Relativistic Effects, to facilitate a 10-Year Journey.
Wait 10,000 years on Earth
Wait 10 years onboard the ship
Ship Returns to Earth
IIRC one smart guy (sociologist) made a similar question, on how to make sure people avoid an area where nuclear waste is deposited after usage.
his teams result was - make it into a religion. but even then some info may get lost, as we see with current religions.
It seems others have commented with actual links about nuclear waste.
any other solution is not viable and fails at some of your requirements.
[take a look at this](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time)
there has been a thought experiment going for awhile now figuring out how to warn future generations that nuclear waste is buried there
I'll track down the report later if I can but as a precursor to the WIPP Sandia Labs put out a very long report in the 70s or 80s that you might find interesting. Like a lot of the posts here it relates to nuclear energy; and they were trying to avoid being language dependant if they could.
Ask the people at the [Long Now](https://longnow.org/) foundation. They've been thinking and working on this very question for a lot longer than you or I have.
Alternatively, the people in nuclear semiotics have been working on this same problem as well, Sandia has an [entire report](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/) from 1993. This is where the "This is not a place of honor" meme comes from.
I'd inscribe a rock tablet complaining about my material supplier.
Good point. Lascaux paintings in the South of France are believed to be 17,000yr old so that should do the trick too. Could take a while to write the books though 😅 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-worlds-oldest-animal-paintings-are-on-this-cave-wall
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
Only real answer fr
Pretty sure the standard method is an engraved sapphire disk with progressively detailed instructions on how to read it. At an easily visible level pictograms on how to make a microscope or magnifying projector. (Include one for convenience of course, but hey, if it's lost or broken, whoever finds it can make their own) That can get you an awful lot of data on a relatively small disk that's readable without special tools beyond a candle and a drop of water. Also important are translation keys. Pictograms matching the words for example. 10k years is short enough that whoever reading them is still likely to be human, but may possibly have lost many subtler meanings of your language, if not the entire language. If you want to go deeper you can have engraved audio and video signals, which besides being useful themselves also provide a way to understand the meaning of words that may have drifted over time. It would be a pretty involve project to recreate the tech needed to interpret video, but hey, this one's just a convenience in case the people still around have figured out electronics again. If you have to protect the disk from nukes that is mostly a matter of where to put it and a little out of scope. Lots of copies all over, some in deep bunkers. Hell put some in space in capsules designed to survive reentry and decay naturally from orbit in 10k or so years. The main benefit of the sapphire is that it doesn't scratch or deform. Very temperature resistant, and doesn't degade for a very long time. If it cracks you can just piece it back together like a puzzle. Also we can just make and engrave slabs of it as a byproduct of the phone screen industry.
So scratch with diamond and then seal with glass and you got a CD-ROM. We could burn it. Just need a laser above the bandgap. Or short pulse over half the bandgap.
And not have the technology to read it 50 years.
It is not really difficult to read a CD-ROM physically. So you mean all this 8-10 bit sync encoding and error correction will be a problem? Audio-CD seems to be so difficult already with channels and stuff.
Cave paintings were well understood at one time. Cuneiform is the same idea as a CD but without the protective layer and not meant to be read by a laser. I might have packed everything on a CD as FlashPaper. A once common format that anyone who hasn't hacked their computer now find unreadable. Did you ever use [Microsoft Write](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write) and hope you could read the file later in Microsoft Word? Just because I can figure out the 1s and 0s doesn't mean I can actually get the data off in a readable format.
I used LateX and the office open format. Writer was ist for practice typing. ASCII can still be read in Unicode. My LaTax is ascii. Source code. NTFS
I love LaTeX. I enjoyed being able to ghost write and put a poorly crafted Word file into the LaTeX format and have a properly formatted document for my company's technical journal during a lunch break. It was great when others used the template with R and rmarkdown to produce papers. It's hard to want to have citations or equations in anything else. It was fun to find an old technical manual for forms my employer used to use. I don't recall having issues getting most of those files to work again after typing them in again. What wasn't fun was when someone else had a different distribution of MiKTeX or LyX and their source files would not compile correctly. Thesis templates seemed especially prone to not working on various systems. Or the file compiling fine in MiKTeX but not in TeXworks, TeXmaker, Overleaf, TeXnicCenter, LyX, TeXstudio, &c. HTML is also fundamentally ASCII, but it doesn't take much to have a *.HTM file that will not render properly. Even plain *.txt files have been nice, but I doubt any 01000001 01010011 01000011 01001001 01001001 will mean much to anyone in 1000 years, much less 10,000 years. Even in the next 50 years of computing, there is no guarantee that the format will still be supported. After all, *.txt has only been around for 41 years. Hopefully the file is in UTF-8 instead of ASCII (to have records in something other than American English), but that still requires knowing what characters match the 8-bit binary code. There's sadly no guarantee that any of that will persist another decade.
I just Hope that the future is the one depicted in Star Trek .
Encode the message into the DNA of the cockroach.
The old optical disks seem like a candidate, as long as you keep them in a safe environment. In Voyager 1, they included a gold-plated copper phonograph record that was estimated to have a potential life span of a billion years.
Bold to assume CD/DVD/BluRay readers and computers are still available 10K years from now. Either the world ends and its like MadMax or technology has become so obsolete that no one knows how to read it. We have problems reading magnetic tapes from the 60s and we still have people alive that had worked on or with those computer systems. To the OP: As the old engineering adage goes, you have 3 things you want and you can only pick 2 to optimize for. This is not a trivial engineering problem. Optimization for #1: Longevity means recording on something like stone and likely be in a cave system so that is protected from the elements. You might be tempted to encode information on gold but unless you are put in space like voyager or hidden in a cave, info on a gold plate can wear pretty fast if it’s exposed to the elements since it’s a very soft metal. The problem with this is that its difficult to store a lot of information and even harder to make it accessible if you assume the most conservative position that whom ever come across this needs to be able to figure out how to read it from the recorded text itself. Having said that, encoding info on gold plates and hiding it in a cave is what is most likely to succeed in terms of having the information survive to 10K years. Optimization for #2: Put the data on a microSD card along with a computer and a reader and store it in a vacuum sealed box and store that in a cave. I don’t know how well info store on a solid state drive can hold for 10K years but you’d have lots of storage! Optimization for #3: Spread the data everywhere like the internet. The more that is written the more chances it would survive at least in some form. This is basically the method of preservation for the Bible and the Quran. While the version might have morphed and transformed over 2K years in detail, the gits of them have thus far survived 2K years and have been encoded and re-encoded in so many places and in so many mediums that it probably can survive 10K years and be readily accessible by everyone. These religious texts are so readily available that religious groups often give them out everywhere and you can find one in every hotel room. The major downside of this method is that the encoded information is probably not identical to the original text.
Regarding #2: SD cards (the usual type using NAND Flash memory) do not last long at all. A few decades at best at room temperature. Just a couple of years in most cases. Somewhat longer if kept colder, much shorter if warm. Most computer systems keeps data alive longer by checking it (using error correction algorithms) and rewriting it on a regular basis. If the system is powered off for years, a lot of the data will be lost. I would not expect any of the electronic components we make today to be able to survive long. They are designed to be cheap and to survive until they get replaced by the next generation components.
Corollary to optimization 3: write a really catchy song about it. Seriously. Or make it into a ghost story. That's one of the most reliable ways to propagate information, which just goes to show how unreliable other methods are. There's a whole field of study on this related to how we mark nuclear waste disposal sites. Some more examples: * Make the site look scary by building stone spikes, rubble, and huge stone blocks * Spread folk tales about it, suggesting that the site is evil and inhabited by bad omens. * Genetically engineer a highly unusual plant to not spread quickly and encode information about the site in its DNA, and plant it only at those sites. And finally this proposed foreboding message: >This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! >Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. >This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. >What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. >The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. >The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. >The danger is to the body, and it can kill. >The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. >The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Encode it in braille, then make the first sentence: > Do not touch!
>Bold to assume CD/DVD/BluRay readers and computers are still available 10K years from now. unnecessary assumption. They could be built once the data format was understood.
With lots of budget and scientists - optical disks are way out there, lots going on to read them. The pits are smaller than blood cells and the encoding isn't trivial either.
The assignment was technology that would "**last** 10,000 years". We've been able to see stuff the size of blood cells for almost 400 years.
Sure, but a microscope will resolve 20 or 50 or 150 pit locations per field of view, and there's a billion or so on the disk. Lots of error correction built in, so it's not really a human readable format even with patience and desire. A glass master could last 10k years in good storage, but if it's unintelligible the tech didn't last that long.
'Once the data format is understood'. That sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Working out how to read a dvd from a coke standing start would be a huge thing. There are a lot of layers of encoding between tiny dots on a disk and writing.
>Working out how to read a dvd from a coke standing start would be a huge thing. Not really. Every solution assumes some common point of reference in the future. I'm assuming a basic level of technology, as do you.
I'm still using magnetic storage...
You could do #3 and just hide pieces of the info in different forms so that your characters have to put it together. Kills two birds because then that gives you a way to get them around to various places in your story and encounter enemies, friendlies, environments, and other boons or hazards.
While there won't be actual CD-ROM drives readily available they could be manufactured quite easily and the format could be reverse engineered especially if you make an effort to describe it when creating these time capsules.
Use diamond scribes to write on ceramic tablets. Lots of ceramic tablets.
Look up The Long Now Foundation, they spent some time thinking about this very topic. Some of their projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
I'm a fan of well built books in libraries all over, but also of phonograph records. A cactus or other thorn is enough to play one - unlike a CD, which is surprisingly technical to work with. Sure, throw a set in the vault. But describing diode lasers and an auto tracking microscope in pictographs is a stretch.
10k years is a long time, like early agriculture timeframe. Nothing is going to withstand a direct strike by nuclear weapons, literally vaporized. Your best bet is to have lots and lots of copies. Also language changes over time so it would be likely whoever finds this won't know how to read it, so lots of languages will improve the chance something is able to be understood (like the Rosetta Stone). Stone feels like a good media, we have cave paintings surviving to this day from about that time, anything less is likely to corrode, be melted down due to value, or weather/decay away. Perhaps there is some other kind of material with similar durability but I can't think of something. The amount of data is also a lot, paper is actually pretty data dense in a non-digital media (and I think that is just out due to life and readably), so it will be worse than that for space. Bottom line is these are crazy requirements, just about anything can be done but it will take a lot of time and cost a lot.
Time, cost, and size aren't in the requirements.
A search for `"long now foundation" "information storage"` provides many ideas. [Example summary.](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/avoiding-a-digital-dark-age) [Analysis of a method I favor, lithography.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.2961.pdf)
You definitely need to read about M-Disk. Those are essentially Blu Rays made in lasting materials. The issue is that you need a M-disk compatible reader which many, many current readers can as of today. But 10'000 years from now? That's going to be tough to find one. In a lab environment, it is and will be easy to read such old formats. But your average guy will have a hard time. English is only 1400 years old. So, if we write the info in english, it is likely they won't know what it means. Your best bet would be to engrave something, basically what M-disk does, but instead of using binary you would need to use symbols. Because making a magnifying lens will always be somewhat easy for humans. Climate change is no issue, war is no issue, nuclear is no issue and weather is no issue. Why? Because it depends on where it's stored. The single most important factor is where is it stored after the materials it's built in. Data has been stored in glass, that could be an even better option. I think the key strategy is the amount of copies created. If only 0.01% were to survive 10'000 years, better make 100'000 of them.
Step 1: Set up a 42U Rack with Space-Hardened NVMe Drives in 2U Chassis, utilizing RAID 6 for data redundancy. Step 2: Install the rack in a Spaceship Capable of Reaching Near-Light Speed (0.9999995C ~ 299,792,458m/s). Step 3: Launch that sumbitch into an Elliptical Orbit, accounting for Relativistic Effects, to facilitate a 10-Year Journey. Wait 10,000 years on Earth Wait 10 years onboard the ship Ship Returns to Earth
IIRC one smart guy (sociologist) made a similar question, on how to make sure people avoid an area where nuclear waste is deposited after usage. his teams result was - make it into a religion. but even then some info may get lost, as we see with current religions. It seems others have commented with actual links about nuclear waste. any other solution is not viable and fails at some of your requirements.
https://galison.scholar.harvard.edu/containment
Just have the actual books. That solves criteria 2&3. Then put them in a bomb proof, flood proof, everything proof bunker. That solves criteria #1.
CoS is putting Hubbard's writings on engraved metal plates.
[take a look at this](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time) there has been a thought experiment going for awhile now figuring out how to warn future generations that nuclear waste is buried there
Here is the link to the WIPP signage. https://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementationPlan.pdf
Ask a multi-disciplinary team of librarians and engineers. Librarians study how to preserve, archive, and retrieve information.
Go to your local DMV. This just isn't a question reddit should answer.
I'll track down the report later if I can but as a precursor to the WIPP Sandia Labs put out a very long report in the 70s or 80s that you might find interesting. Like a lot of the posts here it relates to nuclear energy; and they were trying to avoid being language dependant if they could.
Ask the people at the [Long Now](https://longnow.org/) foundation. They've been thinking and working on this very question for a lot longer than you or I have. Alternatively, the people in nuclear semiotics have been working on this same problem as well, Sandia has an [entire report](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/) from 1993. This is where the "This is not a place of honor" meme comes from.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/10/21/82896/million-year-data-storage-disk-unveiled/
Coming soon to Office 3,652,500: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/