One thing that I was thinking about when I read about scientists recovering old texts is what would be left for future people to learn about the lives we're living right now. Out knowledge is being stored more and more in electronic format which is pretty fragile. No stone tablets for us. Our books are printed on paper with a high acid content and degrade very quickly compared to old paper which lasts (at least) 100's of years. (Ya, I read it somewhere... no proof on this blog).
What's likely going to be left? Environmental damage? Landfills with diapers, broken plastic toys and food wrappers? Probably just evidence of our own stupidity and not much else. Sad really.
Instead of being the Achilles' heel, maybe the thing that will actually save human knowledge will be the digitization revolution - all knowledge being at least in digital format. Redundant, distributed libraries so the loss of one building won't have such a huge impact. We'll have to see how things turn out with the digitization and the copyright laws. ;-)
On the contrary, the digitization of everything has many positive implications. The most profound being that the "everything" can be duplicated and transported extremely easily. You can't say that about a one-of-a-kind Cuneiform stone tablet.
ReplyDeletePeople *are* recording a lot of digital history out there, you'd be surprised.
What will history forget or ignore? The shit, the absolute crap we are producing all day every day. People have been producing crap and going down wrong directions for millenia. The cream rises to the top and we'll remember and reflect on that stuff -- because we should.
History forgot the crap too. We can learn from that! ;)
Digitization sounds good provided the following:
ReplyDelete1. Whoever finds digitized records will be able to come up with the way to read them
2. Electronic storage keeps the data for certain number of years - temperature, radiation, electric charges, humidity, magnetic fields; all these factors affect hard drives, CD/DVD and flash drives
Aleks brings up some good points. First of all, will people still be able to read the file formats we are using 10,000 years from now. For plain text and bitmaps, it probably won't be a problem. However, with the increase of DRM and encryption of the content we are producing, there is no guarantee that we will be able to decipher the content. Also, point 2 is a very big problem. You put a clay tablet away in a cave, and in 10,000 years, it will still be intact. You cannot say the same about CDs or any other current form of media. You would have to have backups of all your data, and rewrite it every couple of years to ensure there is no data loss. That's a lot of upkeep. If civilization were to collapse, would the next civilization be able to find out anything about us? There's probably a lot of information that has already been lost. Does anybody have the Windows 3.1 source code? Or is it lost forever? How long until the binaries of windows 3.1 are lost forever. Sure it may not have any real use to future generations, but neither do any of the writings or our ancestors. There are old texts which we see as culturally significant, yet I don't think that we'd really be all that worse off without them.
ReplyDeleteRyan: I don't know if we'll keep only the digitally significant stuff. With the cost of storage, it'll probably be more work to classify things as important or not. Unless Google figures out a way to do this, which I wouldn't put past them.
ReplyDeleteKibbee: I forget when I read it, but it was a sci fi short story (?) about how these people came across an old human space ship. They were able to access the controls with emulators upon emulators, etc. Maybe we won't have to keep on figuring out how to read the formats of data: just emulate the system that already knows how to. In this case you'd just have to store the info, which like I said is getting cheaper all the time.