Alignment disks, and the creation thereof

Mr Ian Primus wrote: The question that popped into my head was "how long will floppies last?" - there's no point creating alignment disks if the existing media's all failed and there's no new stock being produced. I'm not sure how much life floppies have left in them - 10 years? 30? 100? The time might be better spent producing drop-in replacements for entire floppy disk units. It'll be sad when big ol' 8" and 5.25" drives truly are obsolete, but I suppose that day will come sooner or later. I think I'll miss the death-rattle of encountering a bad disk block, or even the grinding/squealing noise as the surface of a disk falls off and demolishes the drive head. Any magical "solid state" replacement should really include audio output and the ability to randomly lose bits of your data... :-)