Space Apps Challenge 2018

In 1970s digital recording technologies were in develop, and the most long reliable way to store information to long-time preservation was the Voyager’s Golden Record, it was like a master of a vinyl record, but recorded in metal plate of gold. But any information stored there is analog and there was a limited capacity, but due its material, very durable to time.

A new turn was necessary to update to the present.To create a new and better version of Voyager’s Golden Record, we have to use the new technologies and developments, that we have had in the last 40 years.

Today we have a more reliable and high-capacity storage technology, like optical, however those technologies have a limited lifespan, gold layered CDs lasts as much 300 years (http://www.cd-info.com/archiving/gold-discs/index.html) There are proposed optical technologies that claims to have a lifespan about 600-years like base on “enhanced Young’s modulus in nanoplasmonic hybrid glass composites”.

There is another optical technology that claims to have “unprecedented lifespan” based on quartz (Kazansky et al., 2016) which we found that it was already in use by another projects like http://archmission.org ("General FAQ", 2018). Another one very similar is developed by Hitachi based in fused silica material (Hitachi LTD, 2012) , and recorded in the same way as the Eternal 5D storage using a femtosecond laser, and also an incredible 300-million-years durability.

So considering the capabilities of 5D quartz disc, we pick this material as our choose to store information.

Why we don’t include a “5D disc player” or a screen to let a possible alien civilization watch our content?

One of the main reasons is durability. Most optical players and TV screens works with semiconductors, their properties are degraded across the time, so we think is better to provide instructions in the plate of the ship to let them decode information.

And all the information stored in the quartz record, is gonna be protected by the walls of the spacecraft.

Summary of 5D Disk Content

• Description of Dutil-Dimas characters used in the Cosmic Call 1.
• Math rules explanation
• Chemical components descriptions
• Physics

Media images content:

Life

• Flora
• Wildlife
  • Birds
  • Fishes
  • Amphibians
  • Mammals
  • Etc.
• Humans
  • City landscapes
  • Technology
• Ecosystems

Sample elements (Elements and spectrogram)

• Iron
• Nitrogen
• Silicon
• Magnesium
• Sulfur
• Nickel
• Calcium
• Aluminum

Art:

• Paintings
  • Ancient pictographs
  • (Leonardo Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Toulousse, Rembrant, Monnet, Cezanne, Salvador Dalí, etc.)
• Sculptures

Sound Section

• Greetings in different languages.
• Music
  • Music Theory (explanation our musical concepts)!
  • Selected World Music
  • Classic Music with Scores
  • MIDI Specification?

References
Dutil, Y., & Dumas, S. (2018). Dumas-Dutil Messages Explained [Ebook]. Retrieved from https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.p...

General FAQ. (2018). Retrieved from https://archmission.org/general-faq/

Hitachi LTD. (2012). Storage technology developed for fused silica glass to record and read digital data in the order of CD recording density. Retrieved from http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/120924.pdf

Kazansky, P., Cerkauskaite, A., Beresna, M., Drevinskas, R., Patel, A., Zhang, J., & Gecevicius, M. (2016). Eternal 5D data storage via ultrafast-laser writing in glass. SPIE Newsroom. doi: 10.1117/2.1201603.006365

Mearian, L. (2018). 'Superman' crystals could store 360TB of data forever. Retrieved from https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483919/emer...

Zhang, Q., Xia, Z., Cheng, Y., & Gu, M. (2018). High-capacity optical long data memory based on enhanced Young’s modulus in nanoplasmonic hybrid glass composites. Nature Communications, 9(1). doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03589-y