The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of po

The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of power to drive. If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.