Again, I don’t think paper is good enough for a thousand years. On the other hand, archeologists have had lots of success unrolling and reading Roman era prayers and requests for curses inscribed on lead strips, rolled up and left in temples.
The problem with metal inscriptions is that they’re good only for relatively TINY amounts of information. Their best use would be something like the gold-plated records on the Pioneer and Voyager probes: High-density digital data on one side, and pictograms on the other describing how to read it.
You can put a set of encyclopedia’s on CD-ROM and run off a few thousand copies and scatter them about in hopes that some survive. But even ONE set of encyclopedia’s on metal plates is a MASSIVE undertaking. If you use gold or some other useful material, someone will reuse it for something else.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia (current revisions only, no talk or user pages). It’s 12 GB compressed, or 49 GB when uncompressed. Even distributing that on PAPER is thoroughly unrealistic, let alone on metal. On optical, it’s trivial.
The disc isn’t encrypted, but it is formatted for HAL 12.5, their Windows 2000, equal in every way, but where their binary and programming doesn’t overlap with ours. From the raw binary, could computer science as we know it decode and parse the file system?
That’s the nice thing about (unencrypted) data formats: They tend to make a lot of sense even when you’re learning from scratch. Back in the Apple II days I used to pick apart games - in 6502 assembler, not the language they were compiled in - and substitute my own graphics. There’s long been a cottage industry in picking apart proprietary data formats so that others can write compatible software.
Again, I’m talking here about something like what you mention above - “a cultural collapse, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire.” Not a world-wide reversion back to the stone age.
