And some serious obsolescence issues that have already cropped up. Along with more routine physical deteriation of storage media. I think that our assumptions about longevity of our information are a bit optimistic. There’s already plenty that’s inaccessible or lost.
But basic knowledge won’t be going anywhere. We’re often stuck on prehistoric creatures because no-one was around to record anything. But there wasn’t a tremendous amount of confusion about how a mammoth or mastodon was put together. Even before we started finding bodies. Because people drew and painted that shit. And we know an awful lot about the dodo and other recent extinctions. I doubt anyone is going to be confused about turtles. We’ve spent a lot of time on turtles. Even if all that survives in detail is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles it’ll be clean they pulled into their shells rather than stepping out of them.
The joke relies on the fact that panel 1 is ultra clean, Panel 2 has some slight, barely visible artifacting, Panel 3 is a screenshot, and panel 4 has a watermark, and is cropped as well
But if you visit the xkcd website, that comic has been rescaled, so that the first panel is jagged, with antialiasing artifacts, and it no longer is qualitatively different from the second panel. Oh Irony!
That’s why I mentioned specifically things which are updated through changes in technology.
I’m unsure if say, a special compact disc which were to survive intact and readable for 1000 years could be figured out on its own, but if we can maintain instructions on HOW they work, and keep that updated to the newest technologies and the newest languages, then a person who wanted to would be able to read it.
The key is maintaining and unbroken line of key information, and there’s nothing in the past we can look to to see if it’s feasible since it’s all new to us. Physical books were, and are pretty much, still a specialized thing, but these days just about anyone who wanted to could take old information and upgrade it to newer storage mediums. It’s just a matter of keeping the chain going.
Physical books are a whole lot easier to keep going in an unbroken chain. Any literate person can sit down and physically copy it out. Your wax or clay tablet becomes someone else’s papyrus scroll, becomes yet a later person’s vellum folio, becomes a pulp mass-market paperback and can go right back to being inscribed in wax or chiselled into stone if need be.
Even then there is so much that has been lost - mainly because no one saw fit to keep it.
And so much that we can’t read because we either don’t understand the alphabet or the language or both.
The same will apply to digital info if not more so since it is now trivially easy to produce and record information. Which means that most of it is not considered worth keeping.
How many photos for example never get printed out? How many of the ones that aren’t will ever be looked at by anyone - including the people who took them?
Keeping an unbroken line of information is a nice idea and certainly worth striving for - so far the indications are not good that it will be possible.
For an interesting if rather chilling discussion of some of the difficulties and how one might get around them in a very specialised field:
By the way the last one contains a wonderful bit of sci-fi geekery. Written in 1984, it suggests that at some point:
…messages vitally important to the race, affecting its survival, will be transmissible by microsurgical intervention with the human molecular blueprint…
The author adds: the technology required for this form of temporal communication is far from available as yet. Therefore, in what follows, this theoretical possibility will not be further considered.
I saw a documentary in the 80’s or 90’s that covered the same thing and they thought the biggest issue was how to communicate “DANGER!” without it also looking like “HEY! DIG HERE!” to any future civilizations.
Well if youre talking about maintaining information as in specifically reference and technical information. Like as in a sort of encyclopedic summation of the state of the best understanding we have of certain things. Then OK.
But in the scheme of preserving media, a deep swath of the detail on any given topic, raw data, Etc. Preserving that requires an actual archival approach to preservation. It’s gotta get moved to that new better storage format. And a lot of that stuff is already gone. Sure something durable like an Atari cartridge, you could technically make something to read it. If all the Atari’s were gone. But things like floppies, tape, even hard-drives and old school platter storage often become unreadable pretty fast.
I mean there are TV shows, sometimes major ones. That are just lost. Not because no-one attempted to save them. But because they were only stored on tape. And those tapes have just become blank over time. It’s not as if everything we know and all of our culture will simply evaporate over time. But it’s not exactly going to be as clear and easy to get at in the far future as people often assume. You won’t neccisarily be able to just pull up that information and read it easily.
Yeah, for sure most information saved digitally right now will be lost. What I’m hoping for is a dedicated effort to continually carry forward and reliably archive certain vital things.
It’s also my hope that as technology progresses this process will only become easier to do and allow more info to be stored. (Assuming advances that I can’t imagine in the present.)
I’m not of the mind that because we have saved stuff digitally now, it will all be retrievable in the future. Like you said, even hard copies such as CDs are going to be unreliable in a short time.
