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>Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format I really don't think this is a big problem, in the historical context. Sure,

by xamuel 12y ago

>Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format I really don't think this is a big problem, in the historical context. Sure, the average person won't be able to casually open those files, but neither can the average native English speaker casually read the original Beowulf! If a catastrophe wipes out an ancient civilization and all that survives is one laptop-sized cuneiform tablet, historians don't get much from that. If a catastrophe wipes out modern civilization and all that survives is one laptop, historians get gigabytes, maybe terabytes, from that.

abandonliberty 12y ago
Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? Isn't there far more complexity in our current stack than beowulf? Even if data survived, it would take an incredible effort to use.
- jdminhbg 12y ago
  > Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746
  - abandonliberty 12y ago
    True, but how many people do we have working on that problem? Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science) Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex. I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.
cafebeen 12y ago
I think there's a middle ground though. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics were around but not understood until the rosetta stone was found. Without a "digital rosetta stone" those terabytes would be similarly useless. There's also some historical value in journals of every day folks, e.g. soldier's notes from major battles or those present at historical events.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  Given how good people are at cracking things, I seriously doubt it would be that hard to crack a file format.
  - cafebeen 12y ago
    Well, cracking 100 years from now will probably be much harder. For example, could CSS be as easily cracked if you didn't know it was for DVD video and didn't have access to a working reference implementation? Either way, we're surely capable of leaving a better legacy than what we currently have.
    - xamuel 12y ago
      Even if DVD codecs are 100% opaque to future historians, recall that no video of any format existed until the 20th century, and widespread ubiquitous video recording didn't exist until the 21st. If we're entering a dark age now, what does that make former ages?
      - WalterBright 12y ago
        Exactly. Note the dearth of photographs of the Titanic. Just a handful, and that was a major project.
      - cafebeen 12y ago
        I agree that the "dark age" designation is not the best (and perhaps sensational), but the basic issue of how to maintain digital data isn't worth writing off...

by xamuel 12y ago

abandonliberty 12y ago

Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? Isn't there far more complexity in our current stack than beowulf? Even if data survived, it would take an incredible effort to use.

jdminhbg 12y ago
> Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  True, but how many people do we have working on that problem? Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science) Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex. I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.

cafebeen 12y ago

I think there's a middle ground though. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics were around but not understood until the rosetta stone was found. Without a "digital rosetta stone" those terabytes would be similarly useless. There's also some historical value in journals of every day folks, e.g. soldier's notes from major battles or those present at historical events.

WalterBright 12y ago
Given how good people are at cracking things, I seriously doubt it would be that hard to crack a file format.
- cafebeen 12y ago
  Well, cracking 100 years from now will probably be much harder. For example, could CSS be as easily cracked if you didn't know it was for DVD video and didn't have access to a working reference implementation? Either way, we're surely capable of leaving a better legacy than what we currently have.
  - xamuel 12y ago
    Even if DVD codecs are 100% opaque to future historians, recall that no video of any format existed until the 20th century, and widespread ubiquitous video recording didn't exist until the 21st. If we're entering a dark age now, what does that make former ages?
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      Exactly. Note the dearth of photographs of the Titanic. Just a handful, and that was a major project.
    - cafebeen 12y ago
      I agree that the "dark age" designation is not the best (and perhaps sensational), but the basic issue of how to maintain digital data isn't worth writing off...