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> Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades. Dec
by naravara 7y ago
> Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades.
Decades might as well be seconds if we're talking about interstellar travel times.
- close04 7y agoSure. But pieces of paper might as well be nothing compared to the technology we have available once we're capable of downloading consciousness into a machine and interstellar travel. So the challenge may be bigger but also the tools at your disposal. You are projecting today's problems on tomorrow's technology. And I'm being generous here, we're actually talking about multiple generations probably. We're just as close to understanding such future technology as people (scientists) 100-150 years ago were to understanding ours. Saying "in 200 years we'd surely lose the data to HW failure and bit rot" is no different from them saying "you can't fly without flapping the wings" 150 years ago. Those future generations face challenges we can't even imagine today. Like if I whip up 5 copies of myself who is "me"? And if 4 died will it be a loss of data or just loss of redundancy? Will it actually be just one combined copy running on multiple machines (Borg style)?
- naravara 7y ago>You are projecting today's problems on tomorrow's technology. Entropy is just a fundamental aspect of how time progresses. It's basically axiomatic that anything we have degrades without actively recreating/reinforcing it with additional work.