How to preserve our knowledge?

FYI, I’m a federal employee, and the national archives insist that anything I send to long-term storage be on paper only. They refuse CDs or any other electronic medium.

You are all thinking much too short term. Paper, while slightly better than electronic media, is still easy to destroy.

Metal corrodes, or can be melted, or scratched up, etc.

Stone is better, but can be lost or eroded.

However…

The obvious solution to this problem is to encode information in the DNA of living creatures that are capable of surviving massive climactic changes, etc. There are many microorganisms to choose from. But DNA is the most stable media, since it it automatically copied at a very high rate of accuracy.

DNA is the only choice for real long term information storage. Everything else is nothing more than a stopgap.

Information is not media. Media is just a temporary way of storing information. Preserving information is best accomplished by copying it and passing it around not by trying to put it on the longest lasting forms of media.

Hire some psychohistorians to create some sort of foundation to preserve our knowledge.

Of course, this is the basic question before of how to store the information: what event are you planning for? Because preserving information for future generations is different from planning for collapse. In the first case you would keep Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart and so on; in the second case, basic how-to books on agriculture, technology and medicine, and regularly exchange them with newer editions, as knowledge changes.

Um, what?? Do you know anything about the professional history of librarians and libraries?
And what’s wrong with a library for accessing information? (Note: libraries don’t store knowledge, that’s what archives do.) Who would you give the job of preserving different media than people who handle them each day? Private companies? These generally have no incentive to keep things around for longer than one or two decaces, so they only care about computer/microfilm storage that saves space, and short-term backups.

But the information is stored on media. If, as past examples have shown, you transfer information - e.g. from space probes or the census - from paper to a storage medium like electromagnetic tape, without thinking ahead of how long the tape itself will last, or how much the electromagnetism will be affected and corrupted in the future, then you end up with reels of tape that can’t be read because the stress of putting it into the reading machine will cause the electromagnetic layer to peel off from the tape, or the tape will crumble. Or you have only 3 machines worldwide capable of playing the tapes.
Or you get books printed between 1850/70 till 1970/80 on acid paper, that is eaten by acid disease, where the paper turns brown, brittle, cracks and crumbles unless you spend a lot of money on de-acidifying it with a base.

In order to pass information on, you need good schools (which cost money), free libraries, well stocked (costs money) and a free internet with backup (which costs money to provide PCs and access to everybody besides the rich; partly offered by libraries).
However, without media you can’t teach or look things up. And starting an archive in a mountain - while still costing money - is the cheapest option of doing something instead of sitting by. Improving the schools and other access to information would of course be better, but that wasn’t the OPs question.

I’m in complete agreement with you. If you stored your information on some old format that only three machines can read then you failed to make copies and pass them around. You’d have done better distributing copies of the information to schools and libraries and posting it on the internet. Get a million copies out there and don’t worry about whether or not each individual copy is going to last. 99% of the copies will eventually be lost but thousands of copies will survive.

Well then I must have an above average collection of CD’s because the ones I bought in the 80’s are still working just fine thank you. In fact I’ve got tapes from the seventies that are still playable. Not saying they will last forever (or even my life time) but I question the 10 year average life span of CD’s.

What we do now is just migrate to the newer technology. Those old microfiches arent available anymore, theyre on the university’s servers running RAID5 on some big ass SAN and being backed up offsite. The idea that theres some future proof format is foolish. Its always changing.

I suspect that the real problem will be too much data surviving and not too little.

Just think of the terabytes of crap that gets generated every day. What future historian is going to want to sort through the mountains of worthless tweets our society is saving?

They will be of great interest- invaluable, even- to someone, somewhere in the future. Lots of the stuff historians study today would have been considered ephemera when it was created, but now it provides valuable insights into the daily lives of the people in the time period being studied, for example.

Obviously, there’s a difference between the commercially sold CDs - that were pressed into the warm plastic - and your own private CDs, that were burned onto a chemically active layer. And there are differences between the first produced CDs and later editions, when they tried to put more MB onto the CD by making the tracks smaller.
The CDs from the 80s also don’t have all that copy protection = intentional errors, which increase their readability despite the errors that accumulate slowly.

Cecil wrote

However, the 10-year span is usually used when talking about the storage of your private data: the chemically treated self-burn CDs might simply loose too much data if you keep them for 20 years, so if your private data (whether tax records, the Great American novel unfinished, or private photos) are important to you, you should have a proper data saving concept, just like a commercial company, and not only save data from your PC onto CD-ROM regularly, but also check the integrity of the CDs regularly and re-burn them every 10 years. On the basis of better safe than sorry, esp. how important and how irretrievable the data is to you - (you might be able to get copies of your tax records, but private family photos or your novel cannot be retrieved if your storage fails.

No, you misunderstood me. The data format that today can be read by only three machines was passed around because back in the 60s/70s every big scientifc institution/library had those machines; as time marched on, they switched to other machines, the companies stopped producing them, so no replacement parts were available, etc. If the library of the University of town X has to keep a running machine of an outdated type around, it costs them money to get the replacement parts - or try to make them in their own shop, if possible - and their space to keep the machine standing around. Are you paying them for it? No. So why should they keep it, instead of migrating their own files and then chucking the machine for being too expensible? That’s what happend in the 80s - everybody big converted, and the special places that didn’t pay attention suddenly woke up, wanted to look at their 20 year old tapes, and saw that nobody had the machines left that were commonplace back in the past.

If that’s too abstact, look at the old diskettes. PCs bought in the early 90s still had slits for both 5’’ and 3’’ diskettes. The next generation of PCs had CD slots and 3’’ slots. Then in the 2000s, PCs had only slots for CDs and USB. If you had forgotten to migrate from 5’’ to 3’’ and from 3’’ to USB/CD, you were stuck. Today, you can buy external drives with USB to read 3’’, because many people kept their private PC and now have data saved /programmes on 3’’ discs. Many private businesses as well as smaller libraries - esp. libraries that hadn’t noticed the digital/computer revolution and thus hadn’t appointed a special technical person responsible for watching this - suddenly found themselves with programming books written in the 90s that had a 3’’ disk at the back with examples and programmes that couldn’t be read anymore, and nobody had thought about converting while possible. (Like I said, it also happened a lot with small businesses who also didn’t appoint special Computer staff.)

As for converting data and putting it on the internet: who’s going to pay for the time, and the equipment of the conversion? You?
And the internet doesn’t exist in free air - you need servers to put the data onto. Who’s going to pay for the increased space for the provider, and the bigger server to host all this?

Now, you could devise a system where every private user saves 1 GB of important data onto their private PC, like a shared network. But you have to find them first.

BTW, the distribution of copies is best achieved with paper-bound books. The bible is so widely distributed that you can always piece it together. (Even from the commentaries on it, which contain excerpts, if necessary).

Do you know how excited archeologists are to discover a waste heap? There’s massive information there. And their chances of finding a waste heap that every dwelling had is far far higher than finding the contents of a storage shed.

Likewise, what’s survived in inscriptions on clay tablets - aside from the religious inscriptions on temple walls (although those were often obliterated during religious disagreements, e.g. Echnaton) and imperial inscriptions on Stele etc. (praising King X for conquering the neighbor) - are … tax records. Bureaucracy existed back among the Babylonians; and the Egyptians were partly good at math because they had to re-measure the fields after each yearly flood.
If something catastrophic happens - your empire gets conquered, burned to the ground and plowed over - or if simply time marches on - you leave your city to move elsewhere, time and erosion grind the city down to dust - then 90% of all records will be lost, so what survives is most likely that what has been produced in high numbers at the start.

Because the big institutions like libraries and the specialists now know about how quickly digital format changes, and have appointed personnel and funds to regularly migrate before they are left behind with magnetic tapes or 5’’ diskettes. But this costs money for both.
And outside the specialists field, how many small companies and private users are aware of even backing up their data regulary, let alone migrating them? How many people think ahead far enough?

There are two ways to look at this, depending on one’s philosophical and scientific outlook: either the past is always with us, or it is lost to us forever, no matter what we do. Either way the problem has solved itself.

First, let’s look at the possibility that information is never lost.

If the mind is, as Sir Roger Penrose has famously proposed, a standing probability wave expressed through the quantum superposition of proteins in the brain, then consciousness is a soliton, a never-ending probability wave which exists forever. Not only does consciousness survive the death of the brain, but we will eventually be able to find new ways of expressing these waves, thus allowing communication with any sentient being which has ever existed in the Universe.

There is also the hypothesis that racial memory is recorded (and transmitted) through encryption in RNA. While this has fallen out of favour in recent years (the planarian experiment, in which planarians fed bits of other planarians appeared to acquire memory from them, turned out to be the result of poor controls), it remains a dark horse possibility.

In any case, if one accepts the premise that information is never lost, then the problem becomes a simple one of technology. Eventually, we will develop technology sufficient to reveal the past, whether that means calculating the probability wave of dead folks or unravelling the events etched in our genes.

The second possibility is that the Universe is inherently lossy. As time passes, quantum uncertainty increases. Was the particle here or there? Was it this fast or that fast? Was Abraham Lincoln straight or queer? Eventually the past becomes lost in the chaotic, Brownian motion of the Universe, never to be reassembled, until the last few muons expire and the Universe dies a final heat death, thus rendering the entire past unknowable and thus phenomenologically non-existent.

You can see that in both cases it’s not something which is under our control today, so we can safely put it aside either until the Singularity, when our infinite science unlocks Eternity, or until the final victory of Entropy and there will be nothing left to mourn our passing.

If we look at what should be preserved (which librarians hate to do, because it’S too close to censorship and managing the reader’S education), then Shakespeare and Goethe and Aischylus should be preserved over any technological description.

Because while thoughts generally, once thought, can be thought by everybody else (to qoute Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker), this applies to technology and science. Given enough time, techniques and knowledge has been rediscovered.

But the way that artists express themselves can not be done again, it’s unique, and should therefore be preserved before the rest.