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Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch
by rnernento 7y ago
Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch to assume that would all just evaporate.
You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity.
Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring.
If anything I think we're likely to leave by far the largest accumulation of knowledge in history, regardless of how bad things get.
- gdfasfklshg4 7y ago> Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. All encrypted at rest. Lose those keys and the data is gone...
- rnernento 7y agoI think there are plenty of unecrypted copies of Wikipedia floating around. Good point though.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe supply chain is long and fragile. With interruptions in the provisioning of everything from the electricity required to parts for power management, cooling, air handling, networking, memory, disks, CPU, etc., the half-life of such centres would likely be on the order of a few years, even assuming local power. Talent is probably the biggest factor. Even absent greater civilisational collapse, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year income company such as Google can barely keep the lights on for a given project for 5-8 years, if that. Many startups fail even faster.
- rnernento 7y agoI'm imagining the equivalent of our archaeologists finding their way into one of those data centers and figuring out what to do with a hard drive. I wonder what a datacenter would look like 10,000 years from now if no one did anything to it. obviously it wouldn't be powered but I'm thinking there would be recoverable data.
- dredmorbius 7y agoClearly, it's a religious temple devoted to ritualistic ceremonies and sacrifices to our gods.