Sunday, June 7, 2009

Post Apocalyptic Movie Roundup

Here's a good roundup of some better PA movies. There are several that I haven't seen yet. I'm particularly interested in La Jetée, the inspiration for the movie 12 Monkeys. I felt like the world in 12 Monkeys could have been explored much more.

Kontraband: 15 GREAT POST-APOCALYPTIC MOVIES via Digg

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Billion year data storage

One of my biggest worries about any potential apocalypse is that huge amounts of human knowledge will be destroyed or lost within a few decades, from simple stuff like how to make concrete to more advanced topics like psychology and astrophysics. I've considered things like paying for data to be etched into metal, like the Rosetta Project, but the amount of data you can store is really limited. But when I see something like this method for storing data indefinitely in carbon nanotubes, I get all excited.

I think that several caches of the contents of the Library of Congress (and other similarly encompassing storehouses of knowledge) should be scattered across the world. Embed these knowledge chips in national monuments and important locations likely to survive apocalyptic disasters - Mt. Rushmore, Stonehenge, the Washington Monument, and so on. Ideally, the more chips there are the better. If there's one in every home, we'd be able to retrieve one eventually. I'd also put a cache on the moon with a huge arrow pointing at it, visible from the earth.

Via Wired.