[Contentless] ITT you post right now [ASAP] your current thought [Brains][Thinking][Personal][#24] (999)

676 Name: (*゚ー゚) : 1993-09-8672 14:29

>>671
It's worse than that: our information actually degrades much quicker now. DVDs have a ~30-100 year lifespan, hard drives less, etc. We tend not to notice this as much as we probably should because the surrounding devices themselves become outdated quickly and get replaced. Our paper is generally high-quality, but we don't write diaries or letters on it. Newspapers, of course, will disintegrate far quicker than books. I've heard many theorize that we're actually living in what will be a Dark Age of immense proportion, because we do not (generally) carve things into stone or metal currently. You'll still be able to read Roman war memorials decades after your hard drives have given up.

Our hope for long-term information survival is that people keep building new hard drives and backing up old drives onto them. This is analogous to the system of monks copying holy books in that it requires semi-regular human maintenance. The analogy also extends to include copying errors, discarding of guninterestingh material, and cannibalization of other records when the supply of blank media runs dry for a while.

There are serious long-term archival projects (e.g. M-disc), but adoption isn't high. I hear there's a government employee somewhere out in the midwest whose job it is to burn a new copy of Wikipedia to such a disc every six months, then store it in an old missile silo.

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