03.08.2026
I'm engraving sixteen million words into metal
The whole body of work I use, more than twenty thousand printed book pages —six thousand if you count the text alone—, laser-engraved on a ten-centimetre nickel disc.
This isn’t fantasy: it’s the technology the Arch Mission says it sent a library to the Moon in 2019. Los Alamos tested it at 570 degrees with no degradation. Ten thousand years, no electricity and no maintenance.
Before getting there I tried the obvious thing, the one the Greeks and the Romans did: engrave on plate. I ran the numbers. A single Bhagavad gītā comes to four hundred titanium sheets of thirty by forty centimetres, plus the granite boxes to protect them. One tonne eight hundred kilos. For one copy. I left it there and looked for something else.
And it isn’t theory any more. On my desk there’s a medallion two and a half centimetres across with a thousand pages of the Bhagavad-gītā etched inside it. The sample works. What’s missing is the whole disc.
What I like most about it: to read it you don’t need a computer, you need a lens. A microscope like the ones Leeuwenhoek was making in 1670 will read it. Any civilisation able to grind a curved piece of glass can read it.
This month I’m correcting the text of the scans, page by page.
Why take this on at my age?
Because a computer server gets switched off. A website goes down. A company folds. A book gets reprinted with changes.
Everything that can be edited ends up edited.
When I tell you “this comes from here”, I want it to still be checkable a thousand years from now, by somebody who has never heard of me or of anyone from my time.
At sixty-five you no longer work in order to see the result.
It’s a third of the way done. You can follow it here: Vedic Vault.