it makes me think about today's "paperless" society and all of the data that only exists in a digital form [0]. The only reason it's even possible to take "a n

it makes me think about today's "paperless" society and all of the data that only exists in a digital form [0]. The only reason it's even possible to take "a new look at ancient books" is because they are physical items that have managed to continue to exist since their creation. Much of today's "works", however, don't exist in a physical form. They may be stored as bits on a physical medium (such as a spinning hard drive or a magnetic tape) which may itself continue to exist for centuries, but how can we preserve -- for centuries or even millenia -- today's "works" for future archaeologists to sift through in order to study us and our civilization? Hopefully, some organization somewhere is working on this and making sure that the most important "works" of our time will live on well we after all of us are gone but I wonder just how much of today's "works" will be lost. As new types of storage media are invented every decade or two, it will require that all this existing data be copied to these new storage media in order for it to be preserved and remain accessible. Just as precious few of these ancient books remain today, there may be very little left from our time on Earth to be examined and studied 500 years from now. --- [0]: It goes without saying, I hope, that I'm not referring to things such as your monthly utility bill that exists only as a PDF.