Communicating with the Far future: Nuclear Waste

[Alessan]

@Chronos

Those things you describe are all textual. Textual data takes up approximately zero space. If you break down hard drive usage by data type, all text combined is a rounding error. Now, maybe there’s still some textual data getting lost, but it’s not getting lost for lack of space to store it in.

Every time I’ve gotten a new computer, I’ve hooked up the old hard drive and just copied everything over, wholesale, because storage expands so quickly that it’s easier to do that and take up 1% of the space on my new hard drive than it is to actually go through the old data and be selective.

I do the same thing. And you know who else does that? Every modern corporation, bank and tax authority. Every piece of textual information that passes through them is saved forever on a series of servers, until they finally go out of business - at which point the servers are snatched up by some other entity, because why throw out data?

Posters in this thread have been talking about how people in the future will be able to study the past, but I’ve become convinced that in the digital age,* there is no past* - just more and more present. Nothing is ever buried, nothing is ever lost. Everything that was still is.