Historical Media Lasting Far Into the Future.

Factual Questions
1

We have all seen that picture of George Washington, on the one dollar bill. And those famous photographs of Lincoln. And of course, those famous busts of Gaius Julius Caesar have lasted thousands of years. They will probably last thousands of years more. My point is, certain forms of historic media last a long time. That is why we still know what some of these historic figures look like.

But consider the times we live in, and the forms of media we have now. Cellulose films quickly deteriorate. My mother took some old color photos of her family. And they have already begun to deteriorate. Magnetic tapes are subject to heat and moisture. In short, some forms of media, are not forever.

My question then, is, simply, will we still have these forms of information, into the distant future? Will we have them, say, 400 years from now? Will we know what Bill Clinton looked like? For that matter, will we know what Barack Obama looked like? Or what his voice sounded like, 400 or 500 years into the future?

You sometimes look at old basketball footage from the 1970s or 80s. And they look so faded. The only thing that leaves, is CD’s and DVD’s. How long do they last? And will we even be using them in the future?

:slight_smile:

2

Well, people still make stone, and bronze sculptures, and ones in other sorts of durable materials, such as concrete, today, so no difference there.

On the other hand, we also have books from thousands of years ago, the works of the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, The Bible, not because the original media survived - it didn’t - but because they, the books considered particularly valuable, were continually copied and recopied repeatedly over the ages, sometimes onto newly invented types of media.

Computer files, furthermore, are a lot easier to copy, and recopy, than manuscripts ever were for scribes, or monks, armed with quill pens.

3

Even if all the digital stuff goes poof in some technological apocalypse people still make paintings of famous people.

4

This is a more complex question that it might seem.

Overall, I think the trend is overwhelmingly in favor of virtually every major work of film, music, text and a lot of the worthless stuff existing 100-1000 years from now. The reason is that digital files are drastically better at retaining information.

Films recorded on film, a technique that has been used all the way up to the present, gradually decay over time. Normally the process is slow, but some films, like the original Star Wars movies, they supposedly no longer have the negatives.

Modern films that were recorded digitally, however, a crystal clear 4k copy (the one shown in theatres) will be available with perfect quality (by perfect, I mean every last bit will be identical to the ones approved by the film’s director) for as long as a few copies are retained.

Now, on the other hand, digital files do provide ways to screw up and lose everything somewhat more easily than before. If it’s not a major work, but your personal tax returns from 1997, then there’s probably only one or 2 digital copies. Hard drives have a finite shelf life span that is less than the life span for paper and film. At least, to a point. If you leave an old magnetic hard drive in a closet, there’s actually a decent chance it will still work in 20 years (although you’ll need to rig up an old computer to actually spin it up, of course)

However, there’s also probably about a 50% chance it won’t spin up, and if that is the case, recovering the data is extremely difficult and expensive.

Long life SD cards are likely better, as they do not have moving parts and the media itself has redundancy data.

5

I work in film and TV, and though I try to know as little about technical stuff as possible, I do know that long-term backup for many projects is on high-end magnetic (digital) tape.

Linear Tape-Open - Wikipedia

6

There’s an even bigger problem.

DVDs and Blu-ray discs are available that supposedly will last 1000 years. Let’s assume that this is true. In 1,000 years, will any of the readers and software have survived to allow an historian to access the data? NASA went through this not too long ago, when there were no working tape readers that could read the data from Viking. For a published format (like JPEG), it might not be too bad. But, I have data that I can’t read because the software has been abandoned long ago, and I don’t have the time to decode their (proprietary, non-documented) format.

7

And it’s already here. When Keith Olbermann was on MSNBC, he wanted to use a clip from an old episode of Saturday Night Live. The staff realized that the old SNL programs were recorded on 2" videotapes, and since MSNBC was all-digital, there simply was no way to play the tape. They called over to NBC, across the river in NYC, which also had no old-style units. The staff finally had to go back to Lorne Michaels’ production company to get a digitized copy.

8

It’s very cheap to keep re-copying it every few years. In fact everyone one on this thread–what do you currently have stored on your hard drives? I think you will find a vast amount of the stuff is worthless, because it is easier to simply copy everything from your old computer system onto your new computer system than to go through item by item to determine what is worth keeping. So some of us have archived all the email we have ever received–thousands of emails–even though we will probably refer back to only a few dozen of these anytime in the future.

9

Still, there has to be a willingness to keep copying this stuff. If we’re talking about the far future (centuries or more) then I don’t think it’s safe to assume that they’ll still be anyone who cares about your ancient family photos enough to bother copying the data. The only “safe” data would be info of obvious historical importance. But then, history is full of countless events that seemed epocal at the time, but now are forgotten.

10

Upon googling my own name from time to time, I’ve discovered that there are archives here and there of Usenet threads from way back in the mid-1980’s!

F’rinstance: After the space shuttle Challenger went kablooie back in January 1986 there were extensive threads about that, as one may well imagine. I found those threads, with my posts there.

But some of those archives were in unexpected places. One of them was buried in some web site that was in some foreign language – Hungarian, I thought.

So that stuff hangs around, but sometimes in unexpected places. Just as, in the Middle Ages, scholars went treasure-hunting for ancient manuscripts, and found them in out-of-the way places like the attics of obscure monasteries; out-of-the-way Islamic libraries; or in exotic Hindu temples.

Verily, for all the bad-mouthing we SDMB atheists do of religion, the old-time religious monastics and hermits were big into preserving ancient wisdoms, whether it be old Biblical texts or the writings of Aristotle or Euclid or Archimedes.

Soooo… 100 or 1000 years from now… Will the monasteries of the distant future prove to be treasure-troves of the wisdom of the ancient SDMB luminaries?

11

I disagree - I have files on my computer from 1996 that I’ve been copying from PC to PC for almost 20 years, and will continue to copy for the rest of my life, even though I haven’t looked at them for a decade. With cloud technology so prevalent, backups so automatic and data storage so big, my guess is that everything digital will just be automatically copied over and over again until human civilization collapses completely.

Nothing digital ever goes away. Ever.

12

This is not correct. Digital media is still subject to unrecoverable error. The Bit Error Rate may only be 1 bit in 10^14 or whatever, but it’s there. The error rate may be reduced - enterprise drives have a BER of 1 in 10^18 and this can be reduced further by RAIDs but you’re still looking at 1 in 10^20.

This is a real problem for today’s data managers, one of whom will no doubt be along shortly to give chapter and verse.

13

Digital media lasts because it can be copied over and over with very small error rates, but in itself it doesn’t last very long. The Dead Sea Scrolls lasted for thousands of years, but I believe a hard drive stored under the same conditions would be unusable.

But perhaps I’m wrong. Anyone?

14

Yes, a hard drive stored under the same conditions as the Dead Sea Scrolls would be unusable, certainly after thousands of years. But if the data on that hard drive is regularly moved to the latest storage medium (e.g., 5 1/4 floppy disk to 3 1/5 floppy disk to Iomega Zip drive to CD-R disc to magnetic hard drive to holographic storage medium, etc) the data itself will survive.

15

Since was probably not the only digital copy, doesn’t this kind of of prove that data is less likely to be lost now than before?

16

Long term storage media (such as optical disks) include redundant data. This means that if a few of the bits have gone bad, they can be reconstructed from the other bits. (and will be reconstructed automatically by the device reading the disk).

Good flash media also does this.

So, yes, I was correct.

17

A lot of old movies that were thought lost have turned up in New Zealand.

Back before digital, movies were shown from reels of film. And these reels had to be physically moved from theatre to theatre. So studios generally didn’t make hundreds of copies to show everywhere simultaneously. They make around a hundred copies or so and show it in one region of the country. And then after a couple of weeks, they’d send all the reels on to the next region, and so on. And after the movie had been shown everywhere in the United States, they’d send them up to Canada. And then down through Latin America. And then off the England and the rest of Europe. And then through Asia and the European colonies, And then to Australia. And finally, they would send those reels of film to the audience that was most remote from America - New Zealand.

And after the movies had been shown in New Zealand theatres, they was no place left to ship them. They had been shown all over the world. And the studios had no interest in paying to have them shipped back. So all these old movies ended up getting dumped out in New Zealand. In some cases, they were destroyed but often they just thrown into backrooms or basements.

Now go forward several decades and people are searching the backrooms and basements of old theatres looking for these reels. In some cases, they have found copies of movies that have been thought lost forever. (Of course, restoring a movie that’s been sitting in somebody’s cellar for eighty years is also a challenge. But the first step of restoration is finding something to restore.)