3 ms·
No, I don't think I'll be able to read anything in 1000 years, not given my life expectancy. More seriously, on one hand, we have pretty good redundancy, since
by palmer_eldritch 12y ago
No, I don't think I'll be able to read anything in 1000 years, not given my life expectancy.
More seriously, on one hand, we have pretty good redundancy, since it's so easy to copy things.
On the other hand, the durability of the mediums we use to store information is probably not as good as writing stuff in stone or even on paper since in the worst case scenario, depending on the format used, minor corruption can make the data completely worthless.
Add to that the fact that future archaeologists will have to reverse-engineer the whole stack from hardware to software if they want to have a chance to make something of the (probably corrupt) data they have on hand. It probably puts the bar even higher than understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Oh, and also add to that the signal vs. noise ratio of the data we produce today and the amount of data we produce. It would probably be interesting to see what picture future historians paint of our times with what they have on hand.