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Tricky glass question (This is not a place of information)
a month ago
This question is proving difficult to frame in a way that search engines can fully understand.
Context: I'm thinking about 10,000 year warnings, and how they need to survive both culturally and physically. Some of the ideas I've heard for material are frankly pretty dopey; bone sometimes lasts tens of thousands of years under the right conditions, so... good candidate, and totally does not carry a weird unintended context. Another bizarre suggestion: laserdiscs—because that technology lasted so long the first time, right?
My thinking is that a meter-long prism of glass with a message cast inside would not only protect that message, but would also carry the context of the (somewhat) advanced society that could create it. Simply engraving the message isn't good enough, as thousands of years of erosion could obliterate it. Therefore: is it reasonably possible to make a precise two or three part glass casting, capable of displaying readable figures under several centimeters of transparent glass?
Anyways, why one meter long? Well, that offers valuable cultural information, and a baseline for safe distance denoted as a binary number. I'm also thinking that (maybe) Carbon-14 could be used in a radioluminescent component to underscore the "we know what we're fucking talking about" message for thousands of years, and if paired with a similar non-reactive component of identical mass it could also serve as a reference point for dating purposes depending on the technological advancement of the discoverers. Further such components of appropriate mass could be used to denote site decay benchmarks. This entire line of thinking, of course, renders my entire question moot, as it would make the 'prism' into more of a jar. Well... there you go, then. Now I just need to know if Carbon-14 is energetic enough to visibly excite phosphor, and search engines are kind of sucking at answering that question as well.
Context: I'm thinking about 10,000 year warnings, and how they need to survive both culturally and physically. Some of the ideas I've heard for material are frankly pretty dopey; bone sometimes lasts tens of thousands of years under the right conditions, so... good candidate, and totally does not carry a weird unintended context. Another bizarre suggestion: laserdiscs—because that technology lasted so long the first time, right?
My thinking is that a meter-long prism of glass with a message cast inside would not only protect that message, but would also carry the context of the (somewhat) advanced society that could create it. Simply engraving the message isn't good enough, as thousands of years of erosion could obliterate it. Therefore: is it reasonably possible to make a precise two or three part glass casting, capable of displaying readable figures under several centimeters of transparent glass?
Anyways, why one meter long? Well, that offers valuable cultural information, and a baseline for safe distance denoted as a binary number. I'm also thinking that (maybe) Carbon-14 could be used in a radioluminescent component to underscore the "we know what we're fucking talking about" message for thousands of years, and if paired with a similar non-reactive component of identical mass it could also serve as a reference point for dating purposes depending on the technological advancement of the discoverers. Further such components of appropriate mass could be used to denote site decay benchmarks. This entire line of thinking, of course, renders my entire question moot, as it would make the 'prism' into more of a jar. Well... there you go, then. Now I just need to know if Carbon-14 is energetic enough to visibly excite phosphor, and search engines are kind of sucking at answering that question as well.
They're already thinking about similar things, Some people I know have worked on that project.
You might look up how some kinds of nuclear wastes are vitrified by casting in a speciall glass, or how the view windown on a bridge on the grand canyon was made