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by philipov 2618 days ago
We will be lucky to have any future historians at all.

We're living in the middle of a dark age anyway. All our precious digital media are extremely fragile both in their capacity to be preserved, and in future generations' ability to decode them even if they are preserved. If you want historians to see something, write it on a physical object, in multiple languages.
2 comments
jlawson 2618 days ago
I think English would be fine.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.

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philipov 2618 days ago
That's fair, English is probably fine. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me all our massive data centers are going to survive. I don't think that will even require a civilizational collapse, just a company going out of business. Imagine what a full-scale depression would do. And the drive to push everything into the cloud has only gotten started. Just look what happened with Tumblr banning adult content and blocking people from making archives. It's already getting difficult to find hardware that can read old media, and the attacks on public library funding don't help either. We're building a Tower of Babel and storing all our knowledge inside.
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jacobush 2617 days ago
Yeah, but data is like... we could loose 99% of it and be just fine. With the remaining 1% the most important tech/science knowledge and a fair chunk of culture could be interpolated.
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maxerickson 2618 days ago
Do you mean encryption or do you think that data formats are complex and will be lost?

The latter seems pretty unlikely.

(I'm talking about decoding, the fragility of storage is for sure an issue)

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pault 2617 days ago
I have a huge treasure trove of my art, music, and writing from my childhood stored in stuffit archives on a Jaz drive. How much will you charge to retrieve them for me?
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maxerickson 2617 days ago
the fragility of storage is for sure an issue

The stuffit archives wouldn't be a problem, the Jaz drive probably would.

If you give me a few million up front, I'll work on it.

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