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>The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really. Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and

• cm2187 8y ago
  Actually if you think about it, books have survived through centuries better than physical constructions. There has been occasional losses, libraries burning or being sacked. But we have an incredible amount of antique texts even when the physical location of some of the cities they mention has been lost to time. I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
  • emodendroket 8y ago
    That seems like a half-cocked assumption, because a discovery of a hard drive that's hundreds or thousands of years old is not going to reveal anything to anyone, unlike finding an old scroll will. At the very least, no if a civilization far into the future is able to read those, it will have maintained substantial continuity with today's world and will probably have a bunch of the buildings you imagine becoming ruins.
    • cm2187 8y ago
      I believe most of the ancient Roman and Greek texts have survived not because we preserved the originals but because of the numerous copies and translations that all the following generations made. I can only dream of the storage capacity of a hard drive (or whatever will have replaced it) in 50 years, I am sure that preserving a substantial part of this data will be a modest burden.
      • dsnuh 8y ago
        I disagree. I think some future civilization looking back in time 1000 years (for example) will likely only have physical artifacts to interpret, and it's likely they would get much of it wrong. Imagine some future archaelogist making the first discovery of the shell of a old floppy disk. Without context, this would probably become the equivalent of "black ceremonial item".
        • Udik 8y ago
          You must have a terrible opinion of archaeologists if you think that only a thousand years from now they won't be able to tell a data storage device from a cerimonial item.
          • dsnuh 8y ago
            No, I just don't trust that the corporate entities and governments that own the hardware storing vast amounts of non-public data to last for the next 1000 years, and that when they cease to exist, much of this information will be lost. I was being a bit hyperbolic with my quip about the ceremonial item. Barring a total collapse, you are probably correct that they would understand that it is a storage device. I guess it just depends on how likely you think it is there would be a new dark age within the next 1000 years...
            • fsloth 8y ago
              The dark age really wasn't - not in terms of knowledge retention anyway. There was a decrease in population in europe which caused all sort of demographic maladies which caused the economic undevelopment we all associate with that period of europe, but the knowledge itself was preserved in books. Yes, it's much easier to learn a foreign script than to decipher a forgotten disk format where bytes are nanometers in size - but given the vast utility computing devices provide us, we need to fall pretty deep and far from where the current historical development is taking us to forget computational devices as a civilization entirely. If we have academia - and there is very little reason to think we won't - I'm sure there will be departments of digital information preservation who specialize in extracting cat videos (and probably digital physical simulacrums of the cutest cats) from the vast array of storage material our generation and the next will store. The question is this: At which point will youtube seize to exist? If it won't there is no reason to think it cannot forward the data it stores to the future millenia. I mean, catholic church is over a millenia old with archives stretching as far. Is there some reason (barring some hollywoodesque global calamity) youtube could not reach the same age?
    • Retric 8y ago
      Bit rot is a real problem, but HDD are consumer products with very poor sensors. Assuming similar levels of technology Data should be recoverable for hundreds of years. File formats in general are fairly straightforward at the bit level. Languages would be a larger issue except they are also stagnating with slower drift over time as population sizes increase. On top of that we are still producing vast amounts of written material that is likely to survive. Net result future historians are going to have far more to work with than current ones do. PS: Remember even 1 in 1,000,000 files would still add up to a lot of information. That said, encryption is likely to be a larger issue.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • dsnuh 8y ago
        I hadn't even considered encryption, which like you said will be a large issue. It seems to me that that data is effectively gone unless we have some magic in the future that can defeat forward secrecy and post-quantum crypto algorithms.
        • bonesss 8y ago
          Lots of governments mandate specially designed archive systems for this very reason: OAIS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_Syst...], so we should never be totally lost. But there are very good reasons to be concerned that the most prolific information creators & recorders in all of human history may be doing so in an information 'black hole' [https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/internet-founding-father-warns-of-information-black-hole-1.2102763 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/internet-foun...].
      • workinthehead 8y ago
        as if consumer HDD was the only means of storing information. look around you, man.
    • workinthehead 8y ago
      No, it's not, because we live in a literal information age, where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, and you guys act like in the future people will just find random hard drives lying around and not have a clue.
      • emodendroket 8y ago
        Hello. The ancient world and the medieval world had scribes who spent practically all their time on text archival. Nevertheless many texts we know of and would like to read are lost and there are numerous texts only known because someone turned up a forgotten scroll/codex/papyrus somewhere. Even the Old Testament (specifically the book of Joshua) makes reference to texts which are now lost and you'd think somebody would have cared to preserve those.
      • hueving 8y ago
        >where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists. It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found. Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago. The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
        • bonesss 8y ago
          > Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time. For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence]. My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)
    • jhbadger 8y ago
      Books that have survived into the present from antiquity did so (except in a few unusual cases like the Dead Sea Scrolls) not because the physical media survived from antiquity but because people copied them onto new media over and over again. Sometimes they even translated them into new languages -- many works in ancient Greek we only have today in Arabic translation. Assuming that we don't descend into a "Mad Max" style primitive society, I could see current computer data surviving centuries or millennia given how small current data will seem. It's like how storing ROM dumps of every Nintendo NES cartridge is a trivial amount of space today.
  • dsnuh 8y ago
    I think it will be the exact opposite. Books and printed photos have survived so well because they do not have dependencies or require maintenance to be accessible to future generations. Imagine if every book had a special bookstand that you needed to have to make the words appear. And books from different years or different countries use different bookstands. Sometimes a new edition of the book will be released, but it needs a new bookstand that can show this new version of the book.
    • msla 8y ago
      > Books and printed photos have survived so well because they do not have dependencies or require maintenance to be accessible to future generations. A large number of archivists and librarians (no, they're not the same job) just laughed uproariously.
    • Udik 8y ago
      > Books and printed photos have survived so well because... They've survived so well because there's multiple copies of them. The higher the number of copies, the greater the chances that something will survive. And we live in an era of contents reproduced millions of times in a fully automated way, without any effort and in negligible time. Even if the constant copy and distribution of material over the internet and in data centers should cease at some point in the future, just think of all the copies of books and movies and pictures that are presently sitting in dusty hard drives inside dead laptops or at the back of some drawer.
• rickycook 8y ago
  the main difficulties that people have running software from the 80s (mostly hobbyists, but in the future this could be professional historians; granted it’s an order of magnitude difference but still) is finding, and then getting it off physical media. hardware emulators do a lot of the work. where everything is “upgraded” to modern storage as it is in the internet, this isn’t an issue. thanks to projects like archive.org, we are in one of the best documented, most survivable ages of human civilisation. digital data can be copied as many times as you like without degradation, so it won’t be “ravaged by time” like ancient inks and paints. short of a major worldwide event like a global return to the ages of book burning (though even then there will likely be hobbyists that go against the grain and store TB of data for the future), i can see wikipedia, and huge parts of our current society immaculately preserved. when you have access like that, reading and displaying our ancient formats won’t be that big of an issue for someone who makes it their life’s work to research and write the text “decoding the 21st century facebook”.
  • bad_user 8y ago
    Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as plain paper. There are books that have survived a millennium or more, yet my CDs from 15 years ago no longer work and the CD is almost dead. That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.
    • namibj 8y ago
      If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards. The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper. The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light). None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand. Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.
• jupiter90000 8y ago
  You're onto something interesting there. Another thing is the issue of giving our control of the data to facebook. Sure, I could occasionally download my own archive of personal data and then it could be made available, but what typically happens when something like Facebook is shutting down for good? I assume all data would be deleted, unless something like one of those 'crusader' archive teams helped back up everything before it went down, however here it seems unlikely to happen because I doubt everyone's data could be given to an archive team for privacy reasons. It's an interesting problem.