What we know of ancient societies comes largely from written records — paper and vellum documents and baked clay tablets. Clay tablets are by far the most enduring. Organic documents have mainly survived by preservation and repeated copying over the centuries. What does this imply for our own torrent of data?

The obvious conclusion is that it is all doomed. Magnetic and optical tapes and disks will delaminate and embrittle; paper and film will bleach and crumble. Worse, respect for the past is now dead. Modern short-term businesses, election-driven governments and fashion-crazed media have no use for archives; a future Dark Age might not bother with copying at all. Only a few ‘clay tablets’, in the form of commemorative statuary and crockery, will survive to puzzle future historians.

But Daedalus is more optimistic. He points out that fossilization can preserve animal remains over millions of years. Their organic content is replaced by stable mineral, and with amazing fidelity. So DREADCO chemists are trying to fossilize books, film, CDs, magnetic tapes and disks and so on. They are immersing them in pressurized carbonated or silicated water, and studying the rate and fidelity with which their organic content is replaced by the mineral. Daedalus argues that their information content will be unchanged. It is either held as a spatial pattern (as in CDs and gramophone records) or as a stable mineral itself: metallated carbon ink in printed paper, silver grains in monochrome film, magnetic oxide particles in tape and disks. Fossilized information media would faithfully carry their message down the millennia.

Reading them, however, will be tricky. A carbonate disk would be too brittle to be played; a silica reel of tape or film could not be unwound. The DREADCO team are studying their data-rich fossils by X-ray and magnetic-resonance tomography, trying to read them directly as three-dimensional solid objects. They hope to define the optimum procedure for recovering data from the mineralized remains of our time.

But how to inform future historians of this crucial work? Daedalus plans to encode his findings on the glass fibre read-only memory, or FROM, he devised last week. Fully mineral already, it is the only truly future-proof data format. FROMs will be the key by which our descendants will unlock the copious fossilized glories and absurdities of our civilization.