3 ms·

>> With fewer and fewer printed works, I wonder how future archeologists will discover human knowledge from our era. Especially after a world-wide catastrophe.

by tivert 3y ago

>> With fewer and fewer printed works, I wonder how future archeologists will discover human knowledge from our era. Especially after a world-wide catastrophe. Human language written in the physical world seems more durable long-term than the electrons in a flash drive. > Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S. The Internet Archive has archived much of the public internet. Those are both very centralized. The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that. > Is there even more data that could be saved in principle? Of course. But the amount of data we're talking about is already so much dramatically larger than what we have about, say, the antiquities, that it seems like an absurd comparison. That sheer amount of data may work against preservation in another way: too much noise distracting from identifying and preserving the valuable stuff. > The problem in the future (excluding extinction-level events) will be wading through that data, which even in the handful of resources I've mentioned above will be so far beyond any single human's ability to understand that it's just unfathomable. Not necessarily: all that data is very fragile. Besides format conversion and migration issues (about that flash-based website...), you have site/platform longevity, and the time-bomb of cloud hosting costs (someone stops paying a bill? Poof, it's gone). Then you have the spectre of a dark age: a few decades of a teetering industrial base after a major world war that destroys a couple of high-tech manufacturing centers, and that data is pretty much all gone.

Intralexical 3y ago
> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that. MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too? Hard disks and normal optical disks probably could too, as long as you have a sufficiently large redundant array of them with error-detection on your bookshelf— If it can't last that long, just keep doubling the number of starting drives until it can. If you want to get fancy, you can try to pay for something around HD-Rosetta, or Microsoft/Hitachi/Soton's printed glass tech. And then of course if you wanna get simple, you could always stick your digital data into a mountable book/scroll of printed QR codes (or equivalent). Of course, none of these options are actually deployed at any significant scale. But I'm not sure you can realistically expect any arbitrary book to last for centuries either. IIRC Modern print media uses acidic paper as a cost-cutting measure, causing it to become brittle and crumble over time… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper "[…] causes huge losses in library and archives collection […] 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s […] have all the features of acidic paper. […] established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission […] it is not possible to save all the documents from the 19th and 20th centuries […] In recent years, most books have been printed on acid-free paper […]".
- tivert 3y ago
  >> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that. > MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too? 1) I don't think they actually make real M-Discs anymore (the DVDs). There are some M-Disc branded BD-Rs, but I don't think those use any different technology than standard BD-Rs. 2) They're not stand-alone, and by that I mean they need a player or they're unreadable. IMHO, it's unlikely there will be many working DVD/Blu-ray players in 100 years, and very unlikely there will be any players for "some specialized tape." I've been working a bit with VHS recently, and it's eye opening to see a once ubiquitous format start to drift into unreadability (it's not there yet, but a lot of the specialized equipment needed to do a good job is becoming expensive, hard-to-find, and breaking down).

by tivert 3y ago

Intralexical 3y ago

> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that. MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too? Hard disks and normal optical disks probably could too, as long as you have a sufficiently large redundant array of them with error-detection on your bookshelf— If it can't last that long, just keep doubling the number of starting drives until it can. If you want to get fancy, you can try to pay for something around HD-Rosetta, or Microsoft/Hitachi/Soton's printed glass tech. And then of course if you wanna get simple, you could always stick your digital data into a mountable book/scroll of printed QR codes (or equivalent). Of course, none of these options are actually deployed at any significant scale. But I'm not sure you can realistically expect any arbitrary book to last for centuries either. IIRC Modern print media uses acidic paper as a cost-cutting measure, causing it to become brittle and crumble over time… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper "[…] causes huge losses in library and archives collection […] 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s […] have all the features of acidic paper. […] established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission […] it is not possible to save all the documents from the 19th and 20th centuries […] In recent years, most books have been printed on acid-free paper […]".

tivert 3y ago
>> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that. > MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too? 1) I don't think they actually make real M-Discs anymore (the DVDs). There are some M-Disc branded BD-Rs, but I don't think those use any different technology than standard BD-Rs. 2) They're not stand-alone, and by that I mean they need a player or they're unreadable. IMHO, it's unlikely there will be many working DVD/Blu-ray players in 100 years, and very unlikely there will be any players for "some specialized tape." I've been working a bit with VHS recently, and it's eye opening to see a once ubiquitous format start to drift into unreadability (it's not there yet, but a lot of the specialized equipment needed to do a good job is becoming expensive, hard-to-find, and breaking down).