️ CR2032 for scale.
-
@maddiefuzz that is impressively tiny
-
Maddie, Wizard of Installs 🪄replied to The Gibson last edited by
@thegibson It can be so, so much smaller.
You could conceivably hide a microdot in a period on a piece of printed paper.
In a way, this is mostly the same tech tree that gave us integrated circuits. Just a couple decades too soon.
-
Polychrome :clockworkheart:replied to Maddie last edited by@maddiefuzz @thegibson would it work on the surface of your common printer paper tho?
Maybe on the plastic base of a laser printed period. -
Maddie, Wizard of Installs 🪄replied to Polychrome :clockworkheart: last edited by
@Polychrome @thegibson So, for the Cold War era, we’re mostly talking typewriters, but it would also work for paper printed today. The method is the same.
I made this miniature to-do list by typing it on a typewriter, and then taking an analog photograph of it, and developing the film. What’s photographed above is the negative viewed through a loupe.
If you had access to nation state levels of R&D in the 1960s, you’d be using a special microfiche film and very high grade optical lenses to do this miniaturization process to a much, much higher degree.
Your government spook would then cut the film into a very, very small circle (think 1 millimeter in diameter for a full page of text), coat it in a water-rinsable black ink and glue it to a document. Say, directly onto the third period in the document. Wherever it is, you told your asset at the time where to find it.
Maybe you mailed a benign, bureaucratic form to your contact in a US embassy, for example.
They’d cut the period out, and rinse it in water until just the film remains, read the covert document with a magnifying element, and then destroy it.
I’m way more interested in using this for knowledge preservation on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years. This is the same technique they use at the Svalbard seed vault to store gitlab projects.
-
@maddiefuzz @thegibson ooh how how
-
@maddiefuzz @Polychrome @thegibson oh I see the how here