Memory CommonsDeep-Time Preservation — Research Round 2 (gap-filling)
Memory Commons reference library · 5 July 2026 · adversarially verified (109 agents, 27 sources, 134 claims extracted, 25 verified: 24 confirmed, 1 refuted). Raw findings: 2026-07-05-deep-time-preservation-round2-findings.json. Round 1: 2026-07-05-deep-time-preservation-round1.md.
A. Survey additions
Arch Mission Lunar Library (Beresheet, 2019) — a 100 g stack of 25 nickel discs, each 40 µm thick, DVD-sized, made by NanoArchival. The foundation’s position that it survived the crash intact is a self-assessment from LRO imagery; NASA’s LROC team saw only a ~10 m smudge and never confirmed an intact object (archmission.org/spaceil).
Memory of Mankind (Hallstatt salt mine) — 20×20 cm ceramic tablets, up to 5 M characters each (five 400-page books), readable with a 10× magnifier. The chamber self-seals: salt creeps ~2 cm/yr into voids. Verified funding model and the closest living precedent for Memory Commons retail funding: €60 (¼ tablet) / €150 (full) / €350 (full + duplicate), every purchase shipping a ceramic token embossed with a map to the archive entrance (memory-of-mankind.com).
Still unverified after two rounds (open): Voyager/Pioneer specifics, LAGEOS, KEO’s failure history, Sanctuary/Arnano sapphire disks, MoonArk, Lunar Codex, Peregrine 2024 payload loss details, Celestis/LifeShip exact pricing, institutional archive budgets (Long Now, Internet Archive, Wikimedia, Software Heritage, Svalbard).
B. Orbit physics — an honesty correction to round 1
- GEO graveyard “billions of years” is not peer-reviewed. Published stability studies propagate only ~120–1,000 years (Lewis et al. 2004, Acta Astronautica: 200-yr horizon; initial perigee + eccentricity are the controlling parameters). The “until the Sun goes red giant” figure traces to Last Pictures publicity, not the literature. Correct site framing: GEO/graveyard is the longest-lived Earth-orbit regime with century-scale verified stability and plausible-but-unproven deep-time persistence.
- MEO is chaotic — overlapping lunisolar secular resonances; every attempt to define a stable Galileo graveyard failed (Rosengren et al., MNRAS 2017). (A specific “~55-yr Lyapunov time” figure was refuted 1–2 — do not cite.)
- GEO derelicts near the 165°E/15°W unstable equilibria transition unpredictably between dynamical states (Flores et al., Nonlinear Dynamics 2026); objects librating around the stable points (~75°E/105°W) behave regularly — placement within GEO matters.
- IADC guideline history: the 2002 perigee-only graveyard rule was shown insufficient; Rev 1 (2007) added the e ≤ 0.003 condition (medium confidence, 2-1 vote, primary regulatory docs).
- Lunar lava-tube caves are the best vault environment found: ~290 K blackbody cavities, <1 °C variation over a lunar day (vs ~100–400 K surface swings), with cosmic-ray, solar-radiation and micrometeorite exposure substantially reduced; >1,200 g/cm² basalt roof brings dose below Earth-surface levels (Horvath, Hayne & Paige, GRL 2022 — model outputs, no in-cave measurements yet).
C. Materials matrix (hard numbers, vendor claims flagged)
| Medium | Density / capacity | Longevity basis | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nickel (NanoRosetta) | ~81,000 pages per 160 mm wafer (~737 pages/cm² annulus — ~3× below Arch Mission’s 2,000/cm² claim) | “thousands of years” — vendor, no test standard cited | master cost unpublished |
| Ceramic (MOM tablet) | 5 M chars per 20×20 cm | vendor + salt-mine geology | €150/tablet retail |
| piqlFilm | 120 GB/reel (~65k frames) | >1,000 yr vendor; ~750 yr @21 °C per Norner accelerated aging | unpublished |
| Project Silica | 7 TB raw per 120 mm platter (demonstrated 2–5 TB), TRL 6 | 10,000 yr claim | research phase ended Feb 2026, no product, no cost |
| Cerabyte | 125 GB now → 1 TB+/medium roadmap | ceramic-on-glass | <$1/TB end-of-decade target, seed-stage — execution risk |
| DNA | — | — | >$100k/GB write, >$500/GB read (2022, NASEM/IARPA); MIST $1/GB 2025 goal unverified |
D. Delivery economics (verified anchor)
SpaceX rideshare (official, July 2026): $350k base for 50 kg to SSO; extra mass $7,000/kg; escalator ~$500/kg/yr ($7.5k/kg in 2027). LEO only — GEO hosted-payload and lunar CLPS $/kg remain unverified (open). Implication for a ~300 g MC-1 plate: launch mass cost is trivial; integration/qualification and the host relationship dominate.
E–F. Still open
Funding models beyond MOM, and the entire provenance/governance section (C2PA adoption, RFC 3161/ETSI LTV, RFC 4998 evidence records, FIPS 204/205 post-quantum signatures, Sigstore/Rekor transparency logs, Ostrom principles, archive-capture case studies) produced zero surviving claims across both rounds — a dedicated round 3 topic. Design proposals in round 1 §6 remain proposals.
Caveats
Vendor figures (Piql, NanoRosetta, MOM, Cerabyte, Arch Mission) are self-reported or roadmap targets. Orbit and lunar-cave findings are peer-reviewed but are model outputs. SpaceX prices fetched 2026-07-05 and escalate annually. Beresheet survival is an unfalsified self-assessment.