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Modern digital recordings can last for a very long time. And old USB stick dug up in hundreds of years, can be reinterpreted by a future modern civilization. Th
by JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Modern digital recordings can last for a very long time. And old USB stick dug up in hundreds of years, can be reinterpreted by a future modern civilization. They're kind of all 'saved by Islamic scholars' in that sense?
- tylermw 6y agoThe data on that USB drive will deteriorate over a couple decades. NAND memory generally isn't an adequate format for archival purposes.
- beagle3 6y agoIndeed. The BBC’s Domesday book was put on a pre-CD glass based optical medium which should last forever, but they managed to lose reading equipment for it, and a huge digitization effort from the 80s would have been lost (they published a call for help, and eventually someone found a reader in their garage.... but it was a close call)
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoYeah I see online empirical data that shows anywhere from years to centuries, depending on temperature. So not thousands of years.
- krapp 6y agoA future civilization would need to reconstruct a compatible operating system, software and hardware first, then build something with a USB port to put the stick into. It's not impossible but consider how many ancient human languages we still can't translate, or can only translate due to coincidence (as in the case of the Rosetta Stone with Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Translating digital information in a similar cultural vacuum would be exponentially more difficult. If that stick is encrypted, how does one even know there is information to begin with?