> I’s great technology for long-term archiving.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.
I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes:
Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU
Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.
I dunno if Blu-Ray players are going to exist 100 or 1000 years from now, but it could be very challenging to recreate them.
On the other hand you can play a phonograph record by sticking your fingernail into the groove!
The Church of Scientology has done a lot of work towards preservation of the (worthless!) works of L. Ron Hubbard
https://www.colinsjamjar.com/p/scientologists-jumpstarted-th...
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.