Spools and Capsules

The Encyclopedia Foundation of Dr. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series is said to be a repository for the knowledge of mankind, and leads the Galaxy in technology. Yet Dr. Asimov wrote in the forties and fifties, and could not predict some of the stunning advances in data storage and computer technology.

Thus he portrays his characters 20,000 years in the future with hardly any computers. And has Hari Seldon, a mathematician, using an actual handheld calculator such as went out of style in the nineteen seventies! As to data storage, that is an even worse situation. Dr. Asimov speaks of people using “spools” that can be placed in a “book” and then viewed. No doubt an advance over the nineteen forties, but outdated for our time.

Likewise his use of “message capsules” in which messages were sent in small ovoids that had an actual metallic strip in it with writing visible to the eye. At that, those were supposed to be in advance of the “regular” kind, as they would decay after a few minutes.

What does our technology allows us to do now? Neverminding our laptops, iphones and pads that allow us far easier reading than any book spool – and movie viewing – our data storage is far superior in 21st century Earth than on 22nd millennium Terminus.

Do you know how much the future is already here? Consider that there are places where you can buy a cross on a necklace, and the cross will have the entirety of the Bible micro-engraved on it! Computers can have scanners look at micro-engraved discs, upload the data from them, and put it on your screen for you to read at normal size.

Were we to use our technology to the utmost, our “message capsule” would be metal square the size of the tip of your thumb. Micro-engraved with encoded writing, it could be uploaded by computer, but if you didn’t have the “key” then it would be virtually unbreakable gibberish. Clearly, we have made some very strong advances in computers and data storage, far more than was expected!

You may confidently – if you are still middle aged – live to see a variety of data archived on metal discs, unusually small, with computers sold able to scan and upload that information. It would not simply be limited to word data, it could have computer code instructions micro engraved on it, too.

If currently 100,000 pages can be fit on a metal disc two inches square, it could be possible eventually to have millions of pages of data on the same space. A handful of data discs could conceivably contain more information than your average local library!

For you business minded people, get ready to market some “novelties” that might just turn into objects as familiar to us as “photo albums” used to be. How about a disc that contains micro-engraved pictures, or the code to cause the computer to recreate such pictures on it? Imagine a family album – plus full genealogies, history, history of the nations they came from, and any diaries or personal memoirs they liked, all in a disc barely two inches wide? If one had the machine to do it, they could sell such a service to anyone.

Neverminding the business opportunities in offering to archive the records of various large religious groups. The Catholic Church and the Latter Day Saints have vast amounts of archival data, and the rest of the large churches have literal tons of it, too. “Tons” that could be put onto “ounces” of metal discs. With the special scanners to sell them, too.

And what further breakthroughs are there? Have we truly reached the peak? They hadn’t in the forties with punch cards, and doubt we have now in the teens with micro-engraved discs. Can we etch at the atomic level? Could a pin point hold the Library of Congress, and be scanned by a futuristic phone simply scanning it from nearby?

But what of the possibilities of data storage that we have now? The Rosetta Disc has language wrote on it that spirals inward getting smaller and smaller. It is to let someone who comes across it know that the disc is worth subjecting to a microscope. Clever. A data disc the size of a page of notebook paper could do the same. No spirals, rather a “layering”. You could have a page engraved in regular print, and it simply be instructions for obtaining or constructing a lens, plus a brief intro as to what that single metal “page” was.

The lens would allow them to see that the “checkered background” behind the letters was tens of thousands of pages of assorted books, book sets, text books and manuals. Including how to construct an electron microscope.

Which if constructed, would let them see that the “spaces” between the micro-engraved pages on the metal page sized disc contained even more minute engravings. That contained hundreds of thousands of pages of data on every conceivable subject. In theory, that is how you could get all the information you could ever wish to preserve onto one single page.

It may well be one of the things we here at the Encyclopedia Foundation do!