Today's story about Microsoft's "immortal computing" project and patent filing started with an e-mail from reliable tipster "theodp," who observed that the application "apparently covers embedding a DNA-sampling ... networked device in an urn containing your cremated remains so the one year-old baby you left behind can get your oh-so-valuable advice twenty years after your death."

Of course, after that summary, I was interested in finding out more. In essence, the project is exploring ways to save and deliver information over the very long term, in forms that could be deciphered not only by descendants but also by people from future civilizations unfamiliar with our technologies or language.

Microsoft researchers Andy Wilson and Eric Horvitz declined to discuss the patent filing specifically, citing company policy, but they did talk about the project in general. Here's how Wilson described the motivations behind it.

"The genesis of it is two-fold, really. There are two problems when you die. If you have a loved one that dies eventually you get a couple boxes of interesting photos and documents -- things you've seen before, things you've never seen before. It's a period of examination that I believe is incredibly valuable. Part of the problem of moving to a virtual document structure and the Web-based stuff, and having all your files stored on a computer somewhere in the cloud is that it's very difficult now for that person to transmit, if you will, that stuff to you, to the living. So that's one facet of immortal computing. How does one actually make that happen? There are all sorts of fascinating problems around that. What makes you think you can save a document somewhere and expect it to be able to be read in a few hundred years or more? That's one problem. Is ASCII really the answer? Maybe, maybe not.

"The other aspect of it is just the interface of it. How does one actually work with such documents when I can't even get some of the things that I bought a few years ago to work anymore because I lost the stupid AC power adapter. Right? So there's this huge issue. There are some interesting technologies that are around that might come into play in solving some of those issues. So really I think of it as a two-fold issue -- the interface and the interactions and then also some of the real nuts and bolts of how do you represent, transmit, save data for a very long time."

Microsoft researchers aren't the only ones thinking about the longevity of information in the digital age. For the story, I was fortunate enough to speak with Internet pioneer Bob Kahn -- co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and system designer for the Arpanet -- about the work by him and others on the Handle System, a method of providing persistent identifiers for information.

Separately, Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service technology newsletter, proposed several years ago at his Future in Review conference that someone offer an Internet storage and communications service that people could use to pass along vital knowledge to descendants.

"I think it's great that they're pursuing it," Anderson said of the Microsoft project. "If they feel like they have to patent it in order to pursue it, I guess that's a business decision they have to make. But I would hope they wouldn't try and do it in a way which would preclude others doing the same thing."

As noted in the story, this is a Microsoft Research project. Sometimes those turn into products, or contribute to them, and sometimes they don't. The researchers declined to say if they have a working prototype.