Storing coins in liquid nitrogen.

Ad infinitum. Or is that ad nauseum?

 

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The only way to preserve them 110% is in a vacuum where they are suspended, touching nothing.

 

So...let's send them to space.

 

Good idea! :O

 

Imagine the ROI .

 

Amen regardless ill be long dead and won't care what happens to then hopefully someone will care and enjoy them but I'm not holding my breath

 

Glass is your friend. Pretty much inert, watertight, gas impermeable,and doesn't corrode. And glass has already proved that it can survive over 2000 years. Downside is that it IS breakable. But that can be minimized by increasing the wall thickness on your container.

Vacuum may be nice, but trying to hold a hard vacuum for 1000 years isn't going to be easy. But holding a one atmospheric pressure Nitrogen or Argon environment should be fairly easy.

 

Gas doesn't solve the issues with light. Light penetrates gas and can therefore react with metals within inert gases. I think we need to entomb them in some sort of non light absorbing alien matter and then put that block of protection within a protective gas chamber, then shoot them off to space, preferably outside the galaxy where we won't be tempted to disturb their entombment. This is the only true way to protect them so we can't possibly enjoy them. I hope Tim is writing all this down and planning to implement this vital project.

 

An interesting side note which may add to the imagination. Glass is solable in water - if ground up fine enough. Look up water glass. Lots of uses some of which could be used to make/seal containers for storage.

 

No, light does not react with metals. Rather it catalyzes (facilitates) the gas/metal or water/metal reactions . No water, no gas = no reactions.

 

The metal would be permanently changed. Look up cryogenic metal treatment. It's done to make steel parts stronger.

 

FYI-

When storing Nickel metal substrates (with patterns on them) for uber-long periods of time, the patterned surface is sometimes passivated and then plated with a sacrificial thin Nickel layer. The thin plating layer protects the pattern on the substrate from any further oxidation/damage. In a few thousand years, the plated layer can be pealed-off exposing the original shiny Nickel substrate with the pattern perfectly preserved.

Of course if you ever tried this with a coin, you would need to remove the plating every time you want to view the coin underneath.

 

"Water glass" is sodium silicate. You can use that as one ingredient of glass, but it isn't glass itself.

Glass is mainly silicon dioxide, the same material as quartz or sand. It's quite thoroughly insoluble in water. If it weren't, we wouldn't have sandy beaches.