5 ms·

This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slig

by ddxxdd 7y ago

This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics questions: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/

24gttghh 7y ago
>but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists Not so, it seems: https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory
- cadence- 7y ago
  This sounds great. I’m wondering if this technology will ever be available for cunsumer use, similar to CDs or DVDs. The article didn’t mention current costs of this technology.
ekianjo 7y ago
> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Agree, Which is exactly what we do.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  All knowledge is a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  What if you genetically modified a species of tardigrade to hold data in their DNA? They would reproduce forever and are extremely hard to kill. That would be a form of storage that couldn’t (practically) be destroyed.
- kakwa_ 7y ago
  Being able to make copies easily and store them in different location are probably the best protection for any document. And now days copies are virtually free and moving them is extremely easy. I'm wondering if someone as done studies on the last technical revolution of this kind, aka the printing press. To which extent the printing press helped prevent the definitive loss of documents? There are probably a tons of factors to take into account, like history, age, kind of documents, etc, but it could be quite interesting. Lastly, as a though experiment, I'm wondering how an archeologist would react in front of a disk drive in a thousand years. Let say the disk drive is in a good condition, but the archeologist has to discover everything: 1) First he has to understand that the disk contains binary data spread in a certain way, if he has equivalent technology or better than today, this should work. (if he realizes that he should be extremely cautious when opening the disk drive, at least for spinning rust). 2) Then he could have to understand the logical layout of data on the medium (aka the FS), this step is kind of optional has you can recover fragment easily, but it would help a lot. And if data was stored in a DB, it's a second layer equivalent to the FS. 3) Then you have to understand the file format, if it's directly a simple TXT file, it should be doable, and it's probable someone can deduce the encoding used, ASCII is easy, UTF-8 is a bit more complex but doable. But, and it's a big but, if the data is compressed in anyway, and a lot of formats are these days, I skeptical that the archeologist (and his technical assistance) would be able to deduce it's a compressed format and not some random garbage, and then re-discover the algorithm used. And if it's a more complex document, like images (even if BMP should be doable), sound and video, it starts to get really tricky. 4) And then, you need to decipher the language and/or alphabet used. Basically it feels a lot like Champollion needing to decipher 4 layers of hieroglyphs before getting the content. Deciphering one can already be hard enough. That being said, as source code is often recorded as simple ASCII files which should be decipherable, he could get lucky and get the code parsing the layers, or at least get a specification of it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
curlcntr 7y ago
And something else for any future intelligent species: Today, fossils are dug up and flown around the world to museums etc. We publish but if that storage doesn't last or is undecipherable, future civilizations might have an interesting adventure trying to reconstruct the world of 100's of millions of years before our time. I wonder if there has been any consideration of this or attempts at placing long-lived simple markings to guide?
- mcphage 7y ago
  > I wonder if there has been any consideration of this or attempts at placing long-lived simple markings to guide? There's a project to design and place long-lived simple markings to tell people to stay away from nuclear waste storage sites, and... it's hard problem: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/17/talking-to-the-future-hey-theres-nuclear-waste-buried-here https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/17/talking-t...
drinane 7y ago
I think for what is important you can make it important effectively forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
enriquto 7y ago
> On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics questions: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ Me too. But take care about the infamous answer to "Why is the sky blue?", which is quite confusing. The take of Randall Munroe is much clearer, and exactly as correct: "the sky is blue because air is blue".
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Except when air is red, pink, orange, grey, green, violet... I found Walter Lewin's explanation of Rayleigh scattering to be pretty clear.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  > the sky is blue because air is blue This comes off as a smart-alecky non-answer to anyone not already familiar with what gives things colours in the first place. John Baez's answer captures the core mechanism in two sentences and one diagram, and provides more detail below for the curious: > A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    That is not the point. The point is that anything scatters and absorbs the light in a particular way, and we cal this phenomenon the "color" of the object. "Vegetation is green because chlorophyll is green" is deemed a correct answer. The same for the sky and for anything else. Ref: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1818:_Rayleigh_Scattering https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1818:_Rayleigh_Sc...
    - tlb 7y ago
      Substances don't have a single "color". Air, for instance, scatters blue but transmits more red. So if you look at a light source through a lot of air, it's red (such as a sunset) and if you look obliquely to the light source, it's blue.
JoeDaDude 7y ago
As you probably know, the Long Now foundation has wrestled with the problem of extended time period preservation of physical buildings. In the video linked below, they discuss how ancient people attempted to carry knowledge through the generations. Some of my favorites: the stone markers for the high water mark of Tsunamis, and the temple that is physically rebuilt in exact duplicate every 20 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY

by ddxxdd 7y ago

24gttghh 7y ago

>but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists Not so, it seems: https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory

cadence- 7y ago
This sounds great. I’m wondering if this technology will ever be available for cunsumer use, similar to CDs or DVDs. The article didn’t mention current costs of this technology.

ekianjo 7y ago

> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.

ThomPete 7y ago
Agree, Which is exactly what we do.
dredmorbius 7y ago
All knowledge is a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.
jbob2000 7y ago
What if you genetically modified a species of tardigrade to hold data in their DNA? They would reproduce forever and are extremely hard to kill. That would be a form of storage that couldn’t (practically) be destroyed.
kakwa_ 7y ago
Being able to make copies easily and store them in different location are probably the best protection for any document. And now days copies are virtually free and moving them is extremely easy. I'm wondering if someone as done studies on the last technical revolution of this kind, aka the printing press. To which extent the printing press helped prevent the definitive loss of documents? There are probably a tons of factors to take into account, like history, age, kind of documents, etc, but it could be quite interesting. Lastly, as a though experiment, I'm wondering how an archeologist would react in front of a disk drive in a thousand years. Let say the disk drive is in a good condition, but the archeologist has to discover everything: 1) First he has to understand that the disk contains binary data spread in a certain way, if he has equivalent technology or better than today, this should work. (if he realizes that he should be extremely cautious when opening the disk drive, at least for spinning rust). 2) Then he could have to understand the logical layout of data on the medium (aka the FS), this step is kind of optional has you can recover fragment easily, but it would help a lot. And if data was stored in a DB, it's a second layer equivalent to the FS. 3) Then you have to understand the file format, if it's directly a simple TXT file, it should be doable, and it's probable someone can deduce the encoding used, ASCII is easy, UTF-8 is a bit more complex but doable. But, and it's a big but, if the data is compressed in anyway, and a lot of formats are these days, I skeptical that the archeologist (and his technical assistance) would be able to deduce it's a compressed format and not some random garbage, and then re-discover the algorithm used. And if it's a more complex document, like images (even if BMP should be doable), sound and video, it starts to get really tricky. 4) And then, you need to decipher the language and/or alphabet used. Basically it feels a lot like Champollion needing to decipher 4 layers of hieroglyphs before getting the content. Deciphering one can already be hard enough. That being said, as source code is often recorded as simple ASCII files which should be decipherable, he could get lucky and get the code parsing the layers, or at least get a specification of it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

curlcntr 7y ago

And something else for any future intelligent species: Today, fossils are dug up and flown around the world to museums etc. We publish but if that storage doesn't last or is undecipherable, future civilizations might have an interesting adventure trying to reconstruct the world of 100's of millions of years before our time. I wonder if there has been any consideration of this or attempts at placing long-lived simple markings to guide?

mcphage 7y ago
> I wonder if there has been any consideration of this or attempts at placing long-lived simple markings to guide? There's a project to design and place long-lived simple markings to tell people to stay away from nuclear waste storage sites, and... it's hard problem: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/17/talking-to-the-future-hey-theres-nuclear-waste-buried-here https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/17/talking-t...

drinane 7y ago

I think for what is important you can make it important effectively forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

enriquto 7y ago

> On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics questions: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ Me too. But take care about the infamous answer to "Why is the sky blue?", which is quite confusing. The take of Randall Munroe is much clearer, and exactly as correct: "the sky is blue because air is blue".

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
Except when air is red, pink, orange, grey, green, violet... I found Walter Lewin's explanation of Rayleigh scattering to be pretty clear.
EForEndeavour 7y ago
> the sky is blue because air is blue This comes off as a smart-alecky non-answer to anyone not already familiar with what gives things colours in the first place. John Baez's answer captures the core mechanism in two sentences and one diagram, and provides more detail below for the curious: > A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.
- enriquto 7y ago
  That is not the point. The point is that anything scatters and absorbs the light in a particular way, and we cal this phenomenon the "color" of the object. "Vegetation is green because chlorophyll is green" is deemed a correct answer. The same for the sky and for anything else. Ref: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1818:_Rayleigh_Scattering https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1818:_Rayleigh_Sc...
  - tlb 7y ago
    Substances don't have a single "color". Air, for instance, scatters blue but transmits more red. So if you look at a light source through a lot of air, it's red (such as a sunset) and if you look obliquely to the light source, it's blue.

JoeDaDude 7y ago

As you probably know, the Long Now foundation has wrestled with the problem of extended time period preservation of physical buildings. In the video linked below, they discuss how ancient people attempted to carry knowledge through the generations. Some of my favorites: the stone markers for the high water mark of Tsunamis, and the temple that is physically rebuilt in exact duplicate every 20 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY