Dateline 2600 - one of our civilizations is missing

[SoCalDem]

Dateline 2600 - one of our civilizations is missing
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42513/114/

The IDC report that we covered earlier today said that digital content doubles every 18 months, but there's a problem with this, a big problem. Picture this, some venomous cross between swine flu and man flu kills 98 percent of humans in a few years time. The only surviving people live on some islands and it takes five hundred years for them to build up any kind of civilization again. They find abandoned cities covered in jungles, big highway, and gradually build up a picture of 21st century culture.

But they don't have any means of reading these shiny disks they find everywhere. Most of the books have long since crumbled to dust. So much of the civilization's words, music and pictures are stored digitally that they don't have a clue what we were interested in. In fact, such a problem is more real and more pressing for all of us. In my lifetime I've had 78RPM records, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, eight inch floppy disks, five 1/4 inch floppy disks, 3.5-inch floppy disks and several types of hard drive. I can't read the 78RPM records, or the eight inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks.

I've owned computers since 1979. I've stored books and articles on computers along with photographs and images for all of this time. I've even lost half a book because a hard drive crashed before I could back it up. Now, all my photographs are digital and they're also stored on my hard drives. Magnify this individual picture hundreds of millions of times for other computer users and then fast forward another 30 years. I'll more or less certainly be dead but even if I did stagger on into my nineties, I seriously wonder how much of the content I alone have produced that I'll be able to read, that is if I can still see, in my dotage.

snip

In 2600, if the locals can find any S-ATA hard drives that are still intact, they'll have to put together a system to read it. Will they be bothered to re-invent the PC, create expensive fabs to build the chips, and start a company called IBM? I think not. (

[RandomThoughts]

1. I believe they still store info in underground bunkers with microfiche recordings.

But you are right, also books made for many years were made with substandard paper, and where scrolls from 1000s of years ago still exist, books only 20 years old brown, and 100 years old disintegrate.

The other reason for storage in paper medium is safeguarding from alteration, if any book is all digital, a few key strokes could change the info. But if the info is on many DVDs, CDs, and in many books, the information is much more secure.

Printing of books and maintaining libraries I think should continue even in the digital age.

[napoleon_in_rags]

2. Interesting thought there.

You can't put the Internet on paper. I remember seeing a paper book copy of a subsection of wikipedia:


Its absurd. But there should be some hard copies. The question is, what is worth keeping?

[MrModerate]

3. All those shiny disks will have delaminated ...

Long before 500 years have passed. More like 50. Magnetic hard drives rendered useless much sooner. If civilization were to fall without extensive warfare -- like from 98-percent-mortality flu that does its thing in a few months, those books kept in relatively intact buildings might well last longer than CDs/DVDs.

[SoCalDem]

4. and when they exhume bodies in Hollywood

they will wonder why the female skeletons have 2 plastic bags of goo in each coffin. they may wonder if it's a food item for the afterlife.. "two for the road"?

and then there's all the shiny plastic white teeth:)

[lapfog_1]

5. The IEEE Mass Storage Symposium has been discussing

this issue for at least 20 years (I started attending in 1989 and I remember some papers on this subject from, I believe, the very first conference that I attended).

It's a very difficult subject to deal with. Human readable form is simply not physically feasible. However, there was a push to print on archival quality paper the most important "histories, science facts, discoveries, etc" and put them in a number of dry cave environments... possibly to last 1000 to 5000 years (much like the dead sea scrolls).

Making stone tablets and the like is simply not practical.

CDroms (or DVDs) only last maybe 50 to 100 years, and then you need to archive the reading equipment (players, computers, display, and software). Unlikely to survive that long.

tape and disk drives have the same issues as DVDs only with a 10 year to 20 year life span (before the oxide degrades on the surface).

My solution for NASA (and the only one that I've heard of for other major storage facilities) is to design a system that allows for everything stored to date (for any given date) to be copied forward to new media about every 3 to 5 years. Which, if there was a fall of civilization, doesn't do squat for future generations.

However, given that when I LEFT NASA 10 years ago, I was storing about 3 Petabytes of stuff, and the doubling period (measured over a decade) was about 18 months... there simply isn't any other solution.

Determining what's important enough to record to stable human readable form (in many different languages)... well, there wasn't any money to do that. And it would have to be redone about every 2 to 3 years. Very expensive.

[Cirque du So-What]

6. How about physical deformations in a pliable medium that sets up hard?