And a floor wax
The video game Horizon Zero Dawn does cool things with this. The creators consulted archeologists about what would remain of our current era, and there’s an entire world of “ancient” ruins to explore, artifacts (like coffee mugs) to find and creepy audio files to unravel the underlying mystery. It was so well done I assumed it was based on a science fiction novel.
There are many things that have no apparent use without electricity and particularly the Internet.
My tool, Samsung Galaxy S20 whatever is just a shiny thin brick once the power drains and the internet goes down. Unless there is historical, verbal traditions to say what it is, the knowlege will be gone. And all of the knowledge stored on the internet and in the Cloud will be gone too. And all these pretty tools will have no use, unless someone writes this info down, preserves it and passes in along. Even libraries are an anacronism. Most knowlege is no longer stored there.
Almost all knowledge being on line is both a good thing and a bad thing. Electricity stops, internet disappears, and it is back to stone knives and bear skins. Many manufacturing plants can no longer operate just on generated power.
The internet is already just full of “what is this tool” I found in grandpa’s garage? And that is just one or two generations ago.
I recall how one sci-fi novel whose title escapes me referred to our time period as “The Near Ancients”; because so little information about us remained we were less understood than even much older cultures. I also recall how they were archiving information on themselves in an underground archive written on stone slabs, because stone lasts. Of course that was by necessity a huge place, it’s not a very space efficient means of recording anything.
Which it won’t, since the information on them physically decays over time.
I’ll also add that copyright means we are erasing records of our culture on purpose.
Along similar lines, Leo Szilard’s short story “Report on Grand Central Terminal” published in 1961 as part of The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories.
Flash will degrade over time, though the rate depends on the technology. Single bit per cell flash will last longest.
Hard drives should last almost indefinitely. Not the mechanism (which will degrade as the plastic parts disintegrate and the lubricants evaporate), but the content on the disks should last essentially forever as long as the environmental conditions are benign.
Optical disks will degrade as the plastic disintegrates. But if anyone can find the masters, they’ll last essentially forever as they’re made from glass or silicon. You’d need a special reader but the data will still be there.
Presuming we’re still using something recognizably like modern computers.
Judging by human history so far, that isn’t “if”. It’s “when.”
Which isn’t really any different from saying that nearly all the masses of data we claim to be new were already in existence well before we encoded them into current human or computer language. The amount of data in the universe hasn’t significantly changed. The amount of it that some human has, one way or another, written down in modern languages is all that’s changed.
The issue is not the survival of the bits which will still be visible to the gods.
The issue will be that a) nobody knows that bits are on the medium, b) if they do know bits exist, they don’t know how to extract them, and c) nobody knows how to interpret the bitstream as useful information at a human scale.
Electricity isn’t going away, nor is the fact that silicon is an excellent semiconductor. Even if they’ve moved on technologically, it’ll still be obvious that it’s some kind of computing/storage device. If anything, it’ll be even more obvious to them that it’s some kind of primitive storage, just as the operation of Hero’s steam engine is obvious even though we have very advanced steam turbines nowadays, not to mention other advanced power systems.
It’s very different. We don’t have video recordings of ancient peoples, and no matter how much we try we never will. But a hard disk in a thousand years will still contain a pattern of magnetic domains that, if carefully analyzed, contain video taken today.
It might be possible with flash as well. The stored electrons will be gone. But the medium physically degrades as it’s used and it may be possible to reconstruct the data from the degradation itself (like those Mount Vesuvius scrolls where the ink and paper had degraded, but left a distinct cracking pattern that could be extracted).
One difficulty in reading modern data storage is that it is often cloud-based storage. That means that the data is spread across many different disk drives, storage racks, and data centers. A site like Wikipedia is not on a single hard drive. Wikipedia has bits and pieces of data across many different hard drives in many different data centers. There is a central database that knows where everything is. But if you were just looking at the drives themselves, you would find a mish-mash of data.
It would be as if the Library of Congress was many of huge piles of jumbled up individual pages from all the books. If you had the “page catalog” you could figure out which pages went with which books, but otherwise it would just be millions of random pages.
Archeologists from the future may need to recreate entire data centers in order to be able to assemble the data which has been spread across many different hard drives in many separate data centers. Looking at a single drive might be like looking at a single page of a 1000-page book.
As I said earlier, I think those are currently unsolved problems but there is the potential for solving them using a bootstrapping process. Use low-tech means to describe the operation of a very simple computer. Feed increasingly sophisticated inputs into this computer, each of which improves the functionality. Eventually you have something equivalent to a contemporary computer.
The extraction of the bits depends on the tech. It’s easy and obvious if you just etch the information in metal or glass. You just need a microscope to see it. And you can start with simple pictures that describe the more sophisticated encodings that come later.
But isn’t that what archeologists do? They know what media contains information, they learn how to read that information, and they learn how to translate it. Clay tablets or flash drives, it’s all basically the same.
The exponential increase in distribution and duplication will make it really hard to bury our History even after civilizations fall and rise again. The danger is that much of what they dig up from the post-truth era will be unreliable and contradictory. There is also the possibility that people in the far-flung future may simply not be interested in us. We may evolve into beings that find no practical use for History or Archeology.
Yes, but future generations will always have electricity; electricity is never going away. And even if the Samsung Galaxy S20 looks like a black brick from the outside, it still has buttons and things that distinguish it from a brick, and once a future archaeologist dissects it, it will reveal that it has semiconductors, a Li-On battery, etc.
Minor disagreement on this. I have friends who worry about the topic of the OP, and that information can be changed or lost at any time who have availed themselves of the download option of wikipedia in various degrees of completeness. So, likely enough, one or more iterations are indeed available nearly in hole on individual computers / physical drives. But that also means between each update, you’re loosing the most recent additions, as well as possibly creating conflicting versions for future archeologists, as well as all the concerns about reading and accessing the data just as other posters have mentioned.
Personally, I’m in the camp that if we have a major collapse (which seems very likely considering the current pressures, social, environmental and political) that it’s going to be a long, long time if ever before we’d see a successor civilization reaching an equivalent “information age” and that far too many of our assumptions about how tech and information storage should work are the end result of countless arbitrary decisions and compromises. The odds that such a successor civilization makes the same decisions or compromises means that even given the known capabilities of the physical properties, they may be so certain (possibly correctly!) that their version is the only way it could be done to the extent of blind spots in how we got their.
I would imagine that if the ancient civilizations were a lot more advanced than they were, there would have been many lasting signs of it. We know about the buildings, aqueducts, bridges of the ancient Romans - if they had substantially more advanced tech, it would have been mentioned in many people’s writings, like Josephus or Pliny of the day. Josephus wrote pages about even obscure topics like unremarkable criminals.
I disagree, because there’s frequently an unspoken assumption that advancement of a society is revealed by it’s physical works, which of course makes some sense, as those are often all that’s left.
In the works of @Spice_Weasel “further along than we generally think when we think about prehistory” approaches certainty, especially if we’re only looking at cultural or societal advancement, or even storytelling, that was oral in nature. That stuff is just GONE in a pre-written society when the last member (or rather, a number sufficient to perpetuate that culture) is deceased. Even for societies with a written record, so much information can be lost to time and the elements, consider how many Greek plays by famous authors we know of because they were referenced by other writers, but the source material is lost to us unless we one day find a preserved copy (much to be hoped!).
And a significant portion of the answers that will be retained in such an archive are jokes, ill-informed speculations, and outright lies - often all three at once.
But that is what happens.
Also, I think there’s an underestimation of just how much paper is still printed, even with the big decline in physical publishing (and I’m not talking about Amazon and Temu cardboard boxes). It’s not like there aren’t multiple paper sources covering what our modern artefacts are and what their use was, and all important events.
Laptops are not going to go the way of the Gallo-Roman dodecahedron. Nor will knowing who was President in 2025 be anything like guessing who really succeeded Great Jaguar Paw as ruler of Tikal. Not unless all the landfills are emptied, all the distributed datastores are destroyed and there’s a complete transfer gap.