My brother and I put a corked glass bottle down in an old defunct drainage pipe beneath my parents' house. This pipe/canal is quite large and isn't obstructed by the bottle, and the bottle can clearly be seen by peering into a hole in the cement of the basement storage room. Inside of that bottle is a carefully folder paper bearing on it a crude drawing of a cock and balls.
I hope you used archival ink so it will last for generations
It was likely a permanent Sharpee marker. Hopefully it holds up. Fingers crossed that I'm able to return there as a ghost one day to watch someone unearth what they believed was a map to the family treasure.
incredible
Not sure if you’re aware, but there’s a toilet in your bathtub.
Every bathtub's a toilet if you believe in it enough.
The ole waffle stomper
A time capsule
Place photos and some small objects maybe even a usb key, dvdr or cdr with a video of you explaining everything and telling the viewer who you are, what year it is, what's going on and what's important to you right now. Place it all in a water tight container, maybe even an iron case and weld it shut.
If you have small kids, tell them what you're doing and show them .... maybe they or their kids or your descendants might dig it up some day.
Of all the places I've renovated, I would have enjoyed finding something from someone else's life.
Best bet is long term optical discs or long term magnetic tape. USB keys are not good for long term storage. USB keys use NAND memory that is a series of floating gate metal oxide semiconductors (FGMOS). These operate by using Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, in where a charge is carried along a regular style fin field-effect transistor (FINFET) and a charge above the transistor's channel causes some electrons to quantum tunnel into floating gates that are isolated by oxides.
While these floating gates are sealed off from everything, so the charge should stay "indefinitely", quantum effects cause some of the electrons to "leak" out of the floating gate, causing a degradation of the stored signal. Typically there's a refresh circuit within the USB key's integrated circuit that takes care of that and USB data can last seemingly forever. However, that refresh circuit requires a small amount of power, which if you store the USB stick somewhere for years on end, will never get powered.
This is the reason why flash memory only assures data can be retained for about ten years without power. Eventually the electrons "trapped" in floating gate have enough time to tunnel out of the floating gate completely obliterating the signal. The tunnel events aren't many per second, but give enough time, and all of those events add up. Paired with the whole thing that USB sticks mostly no longer use binary logic levels. Most are now using something like four or eight logic levels. So instead of there just being on and off, there is 0V-0.7V = 00, 1V-1.7V = 01, 2V-2.7V = 10, 3V-3.7V = 11 logic levels. So a small amount of charge loss can create a different bit pattern.
One thing to look at for long term storage is something like M-DISC. The matter by which the burned data onto the optical media is made is via a process that takes about 10,000 years (estimated) to break down. However, the disc itself is in a polycarbonate thermoplastic that has an average breakdown of only about 1,000 years in extremely dry environments and about a tenth of that in your average sealed lock box environments.
Your average spinning disk hard drive can store information for some time, but the storage requirements are pretty intense and even then hard drives loose about 1% of the magnetic strength per year without power. And about 70 years is the max before the various magnetic bits that form the low level format of the disk have degraded without power to the point that the disk has too many bad sectors to be called usable. But outside of that, the biggest fault is mechanical failure. No matter how well you think you've stored a drive, it's never good enough and the spinny bits always fail from becoming too fragile from pervasive oxidation. Basically the drive will spin up only to tear itself apart as some weaken part of the armature flies into the spinning platters.
But USB sticks will only give you about a decade before the stored information fades away into the quantum ether.
Thanks for the detailed explanation .... now I know not to rely on usb for extremely long term storage ... never understood how they worked until I read your comment.
It makes me wonder ... what long term storage would be the best option for storing digital information .... like to store something for 100 or 200 years? Anything beyond that and I would just rely on writing something in stone and burying it.
Don't bother with a usb key. Flash memory is technically volatile, it just takes a while to blank. Unless you plug the key in every 5 to 10 years, it will start losing data. By the time the time capsule is unearthed, it will likely be blank or corrupted.
The whole what?
All of it.
A dictionary.
Surprise the next guy to dig a hole there, by adding another hole underneath the hole.
Stuff from different decades just to confuse whomever finds it. Like get a Five Stairsteps album from a used record store, a Blue Oyster Cult 8 track, a Tecmo Bowl cartridge, a Boyz II Men CD, and a newspaper from yesterday.
"This guy.... had good taste."
Half a map
This is definitely the answer. Bonus points for contextless clues to getting the other half.
Bunch of spring-loaded snakes
Buy a plastic skeleton from a Halloween shop
No, obtain a real human skeleton from... a legal skeleton store 🤔
EPIC TROLL!!!!
Write a long ass book that's filled with stupid stuff like "Fear not for I shall return from my deep sleep in 4*10^6 years and give the heavens (a bunch of virgin girls) to those who I find worshipping near the ground of this very hole you find the book I sent you" and toss it in.
DO NOT return in 4*10^6 years otherwise you wouldn't have trolled the entire humanity.
Fill some plastic bones from Walmart with some shot pellets.
A photo of you and your family with a dollar bill in a ziploc. "Hope this antique has value now!"
I'm weeping at the damage to those floorboards. Could they not have been lifted first?
Print out and laminate this entire post.
Termite treatment.
A fake bitcoin wallet
An actual wallet with chocolate coins, each with a bite taken out of them. Bit-coin wallet.
Boooooooooo
fill it with sunflower seeds and glue, like those chinese brainrot videos
Fill it with ramen
Fill it with 3-4 more wholes.
A stack of Freshmen magazines with the address labels torn off, along with one woodworking magazine. People love discovering old porn. It’s like a gift to the future.
*hole
The skeletons in your closet.
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