A less-than-surprising host for this story: Kurzweil: Accelerating Intelligence has a story about hyperarchives: “A Billion Year Storage Medium That Could Outlive the Human Race.”

Researcher Dr. Jeroen de Vries from the University of Twente MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology suggests we could store data for one million to one billion years, using a new storage medium based on tungsten and graphene oxide.

He imagines two possible scenarios:

• Disaster has devastated the earth and society must rebuild the world
• We need to create a legacy for future intelligent life that evolves on Earth or comes from other worlds.

And so obviously these speculative futures require that we need to invent storage archives that will outlive us. Viva the archive!