Everybody forgets Mike Collins.
Reportedly, NASA has reams of digital tape from early space travels that are totally unreadable because no reader for them still exists. I am by no means certain that anything like computer technology will still be around in 1000 years. When habitat of half the US population is under water, will anything like civilization survive? I am utterly pessimistic.
I understand that modern paper (made since the second half of the 19th century) won’t survive for long because it’s acidic and essentially “self-destructs”. Major libraries have to treat books published during the last 150 years in order to preserve them. Older paper and recent but high end paper (made from fabric/rags rather than wood) doesn’t have this problem.
And Ramses II is more important historically than Obama. And reigned way longer.
I think it’s a rather optimistic to assume that “The Cloud” will still be preserving much of today’s information a millenia from now. Even assuming that some major disaster doesn’t wipe it all out, at some point, we’re going to run into the issue of relevancy. 300 years from now, who on Earth will care about your Aunt Agnes’ Facebook page? Or baseball stats from the 1984 season? Probably well over 90% of the data that exists today will eventually be forgotten, gathering digital ‘dust’ on some server somewhere. Nobody will bother to copy it, because nobody’s even bothered to look at it in like 30 years, so who gives a damn? Eventually, whatever storage device it sits on will break/decay/be thrown away and the data will be gone. Data about important historical events will survive, but like I said probably well over 90% of the data that exists today will eventually be forgotten.
We have reached a point in storage technology where more and more data can be stored about current significant (and insignificant) people for minimal cost. I would think there is more information about Barack Obama than other world leaders from the past. We are more informed than perhaps any population ever has been before. Think of all the articles, video, transcripts, documents, etc.
As long as someone feels it is important enough to transfer from one storage technology to another it will persist as long as computer do. Really if “the cloud” ever becomes really effective data should persist there indefinitely, regardless of physical storage mediums.
Archaeologists *love *finding stuff like that. Society three hundred years from now is going to be radically different from how it is now, in ways we can’t possibly predict. Direct evidence of how people lived now will be viewed as highly useful to anyone interested in studying the past.
On the contrary, things will be preserved forever because they’re too unimportant to bother deleting. Every time I’ve gotten a new hard drive, it’s been orders of magnitude larger than its predecessor. I just copy everything from the old hard drive over to the new one, because it costs me essentially no storage space, and it’s easier to just copy everything than it is to go through item-by-item and decide what to keep and what to toss.
I do that as well. The cover letter that I sent to a perspective employer in 1997 will survive for eternity.
That just means it’s not easily readable. Surely, we could build such a reader, even if we had to reverse engineer it by taking careful measurements of the tape.
I think that it’s likely that historians a thousand years from now will know anything and everything they want to about President Obama and his 2 terms in office, but they’ll probably care more about Ramses II, since he was the pyramid builder, while Obama was just the 44th president out of 210 (or however many)
That was my thought. I can’t believe that we couldn’t read it if we really wanted to. I mean, we know the principles of magnetic tape data storage so it’s not as though we just found some bizarre artifact with no context to it. It seems more likely that we don’t have an easy means out of the box for reading it and no one feels that what’s on there is important enough to go through the effort.
That sounds like a good argument for building that pyramid in Kansas!
Reagan has him beat…
That’s a temporary state, though. Sure, right now we can’t read it because we “won’t” go through the effort of making a reader, but that prevents the data from getting to a more future-proof media, too. Magnetic tape decays, both the physical strata and the magnetically-stored information. Give it a couple decades and making your reader will be pointless anyway, because the data will be gone. This is happening to old cinematic film now.
Based on current performance, Obama will be merely a footnote in history. That said, that’s more than most people will ever be.
WE know more about Rameses II than we do about Obama! (/truther rimshot)
But seriously, I’ve heard for years now that the degradation of storage material is an ongoing and no doubt future problem as well. I’m not sure there’s any way to avoid the loss of 95% or more of the data we have now over time, but bear in mind we’ve lost more than 99% of all data accumulated in all of history and we’re still doing ok.
The beauty of digital information is that it generally can be translated into different formats with no loss of fidelity, unlike physical storage media.
For example, with photographic negatives, the image data itself and the media are more or less one in the same. There’s no way I know of to copy the image data out of a negative without shining light through it and recording what comes out, which produces an inherently degraded copy.
Contrast this with digital data, where provided the physical media hasn’t deteriorated to the point that the data’s corrupted, you can copy the data off without any loss of fidelity at all.
For example, it’s really unlikely, but not at all impossible that some picture I’ve already taken with my digital camera could be around in 1000 years, if people spend the time and effort to copy it from one media to another and from one format to another as they progress. Assuming that the translations are simply a format one and aren’t lossy, there’s no reason to believe that my picture would look any different 1000 years hence.
You can’t say that about a photographic negative.
I realize that this involves something similar to the medieval copying of manuscripts, but I suspect even that may get automated as computing power becomes more and more advanced.
The only downside is that we won’t have things like cuneiform tablets in the chance that civilization collapses; we’ll have old hard drives and isolinear cubes (or whatever). I suspect future archaeologists would be equally as ingenious in figuring out our relics as ours have been to those of the ancients.
How much did “we” know about Ramesses II before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered in the early 19th century? The pyramids and other Ancient Egyptian monuments may still be around in AD 3000, but they don’t provide a lot of information about the pharaohs if you can’t read the inscriptions. If the people of the future can no longer access our information about Obama then they presumably wouldn’t be able to access our information about Ramesses II either.
The NSA. No one will expect the American NSA.