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Thing is, those old films will eventually degrade too unless very carefully maintained. I don't think there's realistically any storage format that doesn't degr
by genocidicbunny 2y ago
Thing is, those old films will eventually degrade too unless very carefully maintained. I don't think there's realistically any storage format that doesn't degrade over some period of time. Even things carved into stone will weather away over time unless somehow protected.
In an interesting way it's almost that human memory is the most durable format -- as long as we remember to care for and preserve information, we can keep it around as long as people are around; But once people stop caring about it, eventually it will fade.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoWe have ancient oral traditions that describe constellations that no longer exist (the Seven Sisters). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoDo you mean the Pleiades?
- wizzwizz4 2y agoYes, the Pleiades, which consists of 6 bright points of light in the sky, yet is still called the "Seven Sisters" (or "Seven Brothers", or similar). Some mythologies tell us what happened to the seventh, while others leave the discrepancy unresolved – or else, those stories do not survive.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThat's it, data needs to be refreshed regularly, archival data needs to be kept 'alive' and transferred to newer media on a continuous basis.
- philistine 2y agoThe word unless is unfortunately superfluous in your statement. David Fincher just went through a grueling restoration process for Seven, and he talked about the process and basically said: Eastman Kodak has spent a lot of money to convince Hollywood that if your shoot on film and keep it in a vault that it will never degrade. It’s false.
- genocidicbunny 2y agoI guess you could stave off the degradation by occasionally transferring the film to new media. But yeah, the unless is kind of superfluous there, even with frequent 'refreshing' film will eventually degrade.
- foobarian 2y agoI wonder if you could come up with a preservation metric tied to time investment or labor. The oral tradition is very labor intensive. How does it compare to the labor required to mine, refine, and build computers and hard drives for a storage service like S3 to preserve an equivalent amount of information? Or to chiseling everything into giant stone tablets? Printing and re-printing books?
- yencabulator 2y agoThis place is not a place of honor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin... Also, ray cat memes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/