An Optics Craze

In another article we spoke of how the Encyclopedia Foundation may end up using a metal disc the size of an 8 by 10 page for storing data. Not because it is the most efficient, but because it may be most efficient for our purposes. You see, by a process of “layering” we could have successively smaller print that would allow us to guide the reader further and further “in” to the page.

Eventually he would have it all. How does that work?

As mentioned, the page would have normal sized engravings on a checkered background. A reading of it – unaided as it would be regular sized font – would introduce the person to what we were attempting, and that there were further messages to be seen by the obtaining or crafting of a lens.

That lens would reveal that the checker board pattern was really tens of thousands of pages of information, and in between the pages would be even more (hundreds of thousands or millions) of pages of data that could only be read by an electron microscope. Instructions for which would be on the second layer viewable with a lens.

Now imagine 4,481 years in the future, or any other time in which civilization has collapsed, and people have lived primitively for a few generations, and they are starting to rebuild civilization and…they come across one of those “pages”!

Imagine the craze that they would have for the science of optics! Lens crafting and the making of ever more accurate and precise microscopes would be their foremost concern! That, and finding more “pages”. For you see, given the vast volumes of data that our culture has on each subject, even that “layering” trick might be good only for showing all the data on a single set of subjects. A “science” page or a “history” page or etc.

Such “pages” could be highly valued, though we will live to see them very cheap in our time, if all goes well.

Likewise in the future, such pages could be very handy for any interplanetary or inter-stellar colonizing efforts. Currently it costs about $20,000 per pound we put into space. So even if at a future point it is cheaper, one can see that one should economize in weight where one can!

Which is easier, a five story library on a ship? Or that the Captain’s Log be bound in two metal “pages”, each with each side covered in that layered fashion, thus giving the equivalent of four of those metal pages, with the tens of millions of pages of data that we know it can hold? And obviously an electron microscope would be easier to carry than the five story library!

You could go further in “weight saving”. In the wall of the ship there will inevitably need to be access ports to the inside of the walls. Such could be made to be a given size…oh, say 8 by 10!...and those be the pages! You could have all the information one could possibly wish micro-engraved into the hatches and covers of the walls of the ship! To be removed when it arrives at it’s destination.

Extra space? Zero. Extra weight? Less ! For it would have had a microscopic amount shaved off it in the engraving! The information would actually not cost any weight at all, and would actually REDUCE the weight of the ship, albeit by an infinitesimal amount!

Another use for such “pages”? We could have them on random spots throughout our own world here and now, if we can develop an iphone that could scan them and display (visually or audibly) what the information was. This would have an advantage over an electronic chip in that it could be made more resistant to the weather.

Get used to such “pages”. If you don’t live to see them , it’s a sure bet your grandchildren will!