It’s a shame that we have so few records from past civilizations. Some cultures were nice enough to carve some of their knowledge into stone or bake it into clay tablets, but for the most part it’s gone, baby, gone. What about knowledge and history? Thousands of years from now none of our books, newspapers, magazines, microfiches, tapes, hard drives, CD ROM’s, DVD’s, flashdrives, etc. are going to be around or readable. Future civilizations will know more about the Babylonians than about us.
How do we get our info down in permanent, readable form before our big crash? We should be stockpiling records in thousands of caves and underground bunkers around the world. But what’s the best medium? It would need to be dense, but I think it should be visually readable by a low-power microscope. I was thinking that photolithography, used to make integrated circuits, would be good to make multiple copies of microscopically readable records. This suggests using silicon wafers as “paper”, but that might be too expensive. But then again it wouldn’t have to be ultra-pure, single-crystaline material.
Important records are continuously copied onto the “newest” storage media, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. (Things getting copied from paper to microfiche to digital scan to whatever comes next, for example- that’s why you can read papers from the 1780s, for example)
But you’re right, there will be a gap in “Cultural Knowledge” because people don’t keep diaries they way they used to, so much of people’s “Everyday Musings” are in e-mails, or on websites. There are efforts afoot to archive this sort of thing (like the Internet Archive, for example), but it is a real concern in academia and rightly so, IMHO,
For the most part, the issue is catastrophic economic decline or not.
(I’d be glad to hear from any historians who believe there wasn’t a such an economic decline at the beginning of what we used to call the Middle Ages.)
The Renaissance was a redistribution of knowledge in most cases. None of the knowledge of humanity had been “lost,” but much of it was isolated. Economic growth led to intellectual exchange.
There have been reports that early computer files are now unreadable (I know that the first common State Department computers were Wangs, and so forth.) But I suspect that those issues have ended because I haven’t seen any stories about “loss of documents” in quite some time.
There is at least one book on how to pass important messages on to future generations (sorry, I own it but can’t get to it right now). The idea is basically that we make things “tabu,” believe or not. The author thinks that non-rational (religious) prohibitions are more powerful in human history. These would be used for nuclear wastes, particulariy.
So, if we can avoid a centuries long economic decline, a shift of media so rapid we can’t keep up, and learn something from history, we might be OK!
It did happen in some cases (the astronomy department at my alma mater ended up throwing out huge racks of paper tape data, because nobody could read it any more), but I think everyone’s aware of the problem, now, and is making an effort to keep data on up-to-date formats.
Of course, if you’re worried that people won’t keep updating, the wonderful thing about digital formats is that they can be copied indefinitely without loss of information, so there’s very little cost to just making a whole bunch of copies of things, in as many different formats as you want.
I doubt that future civilizations will know less about us than we do about the Babylonians. You make it sound like no CDs or other media will survive, and that’s just not true.
Existing ancient documents are a perfect metaphor our future civilizations will find. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not found in a condition that anyone would call intact or functional. People worked very hard to piece them back together, using very careful analysis and knowing that there were gaps in the data. Some of it could only be read under special light with computer enhancement. Some of it was entirely unreadable, so we got less than 100% of what was stored.
So, when someone 1,000 years from now finds a CD, they will not be able to just stick it in their laptop and make a copy. They will, however, be able to carefully separate the layers, to scan each bit and to do their best to reconstruct the data - much like a modern data recovery service does with recently damaged disks. When it comes to things like movies and books, they’ll probably have multiple copies to use to fill in gaps.
And… just like we use computers to read papyrus, it’s likely that future archaeologists will use technology we can’t even imagine to read what we leave behind.
Librarians and archivists are aware and working on this problem. Several solutions for long-term storage have been proposed. The latest one I remember was to to etch into a CD made of platinum - a hard metal - and starting with very very small-print. The starter file would contain an instruction on how to build a reading device for the rest of the data, so even if all civilsation was hit by an asteroid and went kablooie, people who came along 1 000 years or more later could still find a way to read it.
Acid-free paper stored at stable temperature and humidity has hundreds of times better prognosis than any CD-ROMs, DVDs or similar. And yes, loss of data occurs on both the old magnetic diskettes as well as the optical CD/DVDs. Back in the 90s, they promised us 50 to 100 years; turns out 10 years is average, and then you have to transfer them.
Paper also gets around the problem of needing a device for reading plus software to interpret the data. Which is why the method of re-sizing that was used in microfilm and microfiche in the 70s is now back again - you would only need a microscope, not a DVD-reader plus Software.
Chemically treated paper, like photographs, are a problem, however, as the chemicals continue to react.
For storage, old mines or caves are used, for stable temperatures and thick isolation against catastrophes outside.
I don’t think CDs are that reliable over a decade, let alone a century. I too have worried about this. I think that microscopic writing on the best paper we can get (I think it might be rag paper; I once saw a Gutenberg bible that was perfectly legible, save for the typeface and language (neither of which is an insuperable problem for archeologists) and it was well over 500 years old and looked good for any 500 at least. Storage in a cool dry place would obviously improve things enormously.
If civilization falls (and there is no reason to doubt it will when we have used up all the readily available resources) all these CDs, hard drives, SD cards and whatnot will be as useful as AOL coasters are today. It is staggering to realize that it is only by a historical accident (Arabic translations) that we know anything at all about the works of Euclid. Short of chisel on stone, I know of no medium more stable than ink on paper.
We might as well program the server to post this statement automatically on every thread.
Of course it matters not a whit what future civilizations know about us. It doesn’t matter either what went on in past civilizations. For some perverted reasons, however, there are people who study the traces of ancient civilizations trying to understand what they were like. It’s not impossible that there will be archeologists in the future who are curious about us. But we’ll all be dead so it won’t benefit us at all to leave records behind that they could read.
But anyway, if there is anyone out there who wants to play this pointless mind game with me… Let’s suppose there is a dark age and the chain of records copying and updating gets broken. Thousands of years later civilization begins reviving and archeologist dig up the remains of our buildings and monuments - with some carvings on them which may be writing. But all our paper records, CD’s, tapes, etc have long since turned to dust. Maybe they dig up hard drives and flash drives etc. but they have no way of knowing what they are, much less how to read them - assuming there are even traces of data left that has not bled away. Let’s suppose that, out of some sense of vanity, we want to leave behind records that our far descendants could read. How would we do it?
The best way would be to found a dedicated order of monks, who will preserve the knowledge in a monastery high in the Himalayas or someplace like that. They will make it their duty, through the generations, to copy their complete library of human knowledge to the newest possible medium, year after year. They would have to be a bi-gendered order, of course, in order to keep the generations coming.
Hari Seldon, you could call it a “Foundation” dedicated to the preservation of human knowledge through the interregnum…TRM
Hopefully that would be true. It’s also possible that our records would be found by a less advanced civilization that’s rediscovering science and their own ancient history. Maybe we could give them some Darwin and Einstein they would enjoy reading.
Unlikely. In the past two decades, several archives in mountain mines and caverns have already been established, run by several different organisations /private individuals, in different places. A global dark age is unlikely - even in the Middle Ages, the Islamic world and China were more advanced than Western Europe. Unless a meteor big enough to destroy current life hits, some body will be left over who cares about archives. (And even with a meteor, we would see it coming early enough that some people get into those military top-level bunkers and survive).
And like I said, good paper wouldn’t crumble to dust. 500 year old paper, 1000 year old paper is often been perfectly good shape. Mold and insects can damage it, so you put it into containers that are safe, and keep the temperature stable. Even if nobody visits for the next 1 000 years, the books will be in good shape.
It assumes that the art of reading hasn’t been lost, though, but if you’re worried about that, include a couple of primers at the entrance.
But stone takes up far more place than a sheet of paper, is more expensive to carve (and to make a thin slice before), is heavy and breaks easily.
Do you want to progam data onto it like computer chips? Then you run into the reading device + software problem.
If you want to write onto Silicon pure optical, like in a book, then it’s far cheaper to take acid-free paper and write a book then make sturdy wafers, etch/print onto them and coat them. Plus, everything that’s brittle is also breakable.
BTW, if you want to get the same paper quality that has been proven to last some thousand years, you make the paper not from wood like today, but from cloth fiber (Hadern) - like banknotes that survive even a washing machine cycle today. It’s more expensive than wood paper, and is a bit thicker, but has longer-lasting quality.
Also, you don’t use glue and paperback binding, but proper thread and linen-cover. Library linen lasts very long and is resilient to water droplets.
My thoughts were along the lines of what constanze posted.
Silicon would be too fragile and reactive a medium for any sort of long term storage. Platinum would be much better and I’m sure a metallurgist could recommend better materials.
Create books of whatever material. Start out on the first pages laying out a rosetta table designed to be translated. Periodic tables, number sequences, all information that should be easily recognizeable and decodable.
Do all of this in a 10pt font. Once you get through all of that and the index of the inscribed information you begin etching the text in progressively smaller fonts until you reach the desired size.
Forgot to mention earlier, laser etching of course.
I don’t think it’d be all that easy to extract the data, even if they have a perfectly preserved CD. This PDF file on the subject is well worth reading.
Do you mean they= the archivists or they= the guys who were diggig nearby? Because although it’s certainly a cultural disaster - and a headdesk moment considering that the papers in the archive go back 2 000 years to the Romans, and survived all the fires and wars and destruction, up to the 80%+ bombing in WWII, only to be done in by the stupidity, greed and apathy (in city hall and managment) of some idiots. It could have been prevented. For weeks people near the dig observed splits in the walls and warned. And in the 90s, when digging for a subway and not taking enough time to verify the structural composition, in Munich-Trudering a hole suddenly appeared in the street, and a whole bus fell into it (many people were killed). So it should have been known that Earth is not as solid as it looks, and Geologists and experts are worth their money.
Two young men in a house next to the archive lots their lives in the collapse. While a lot of the archive can still be saved - many students and experts have volunteered their time, and the fire brigade quickly put up an awning to cover the site - those lifes were needlessly lost and can never be returned. It’s really sad and makes me angry for the stupidity and unneccessarity of the event.
It really depends a lot on what resources these future researchers have. A stone tablet or printed book are of little value to someone who doesn’t understand the language, which is why the Rosetta stone is so famous. Someone with a digital Rosetta stone would likely be able to piece things together using many of the same techniques modern data recovery services use. Without the right formatting specifications, software, etc. it isn’t all that different from trying to read any other ancient forgotten language.
I suspect that many of our prevalent and open-source standards are going to be remembered almost indefinitely - TXT, CSV, HTML, XML, GIF and others, for example - even if we advance to a time when reading an HTML file is as unusual as reading the Bible in the original Greek.
It’s also worth noting that CSV is just a data format using TXT. HMTL and XML are markup languages that are also based on TXT. In that way, we’ve created a hierarchy of documents that can identify themselves and explain what to do with them as long as you can read a few fundamental types. If we postulate a collapse of civilization so severe that we lose knowledge even of ASCII, then it might be that all digital records will be worthless… but that’s no so different from a collapse in which we’ve forgotten how to read languages with roman alphabets.
I mean seriously, in five thousand or so years of recorded history librarians have managed to come up with… the library. Innovation isn’t the librarian’s forté.