The BBC set out to store a bunch of data for future generations. They thought that putting it on laser-discs would allow people to read it centuries from now.
Unfortunately we did in fact lose the vast majority of dick drawings made 10,000 years ago and what has survived did so through mere chance. Not much has changed really.
We probably shouldn’t store all our dick drawings in one place
But joking aside we should be better at this by now. Passing down knowledge that came before us is pretty damn important to science and human advancement. Unless we want every every generation to have to rediscover what germs are and stuff.
All our paper and ink degrade very fast compared to the ones used historically; laser-printed stuff is even worse; and digital media (with the possible exception of tape, which might be slightly better than paper) worse than both. All our modern data is stored on such media.
There are some projects that exist; such as the memory of mankind project, which uses human-readable laser-etched ceramic tablets stored in an abandoned salt mine for long term archival. They also have ceramic micro-film, but one of their requirements is that the most important data can be read without any need for a computer, etc. hence the aforementioned larger tablets.
I was thinking about long-term historical traces (for which higher density tends to mean less lifetime), based on the dick drawings comment above; you’re right for other considerations though.
Stone tablets with dick drawings survived 10000 years but these chucklefucks can’t preserve our history for 100
Check out the Domesday Project
The BBC set out to store a bunch of data for future generations. They thought that putting it on laser-discs would allow people to read it centuries from now.
Within 25 years, it was basically unuseable.
Modern humans are soooooo good at this.
Unfortunately we did in fact lose the vast majority of dick drawings made 10,000 years ago and what has survived did so through mere chance. Not much has changed really.
We probably shouldn’t store all our dick drawings in one place
But joking aside we should be better at this by now. Passing down knowledge that came before us is pretty damn important to science and human advancement. Unless we want every every generation to have to rediscover what germs are and stuff.
I think it’s actually worse now than in the past.
All our paper and ink degrade very fast compared to the ones used historically; laser-printed stuff is even worse; and digital media (with the possible exception of tape, which might be slightly better than paper) worse than both. All our modern data is stored on such media.
There are some projects that exist; such as the memory of mankind project, which uses human-readable laser-etched ceramic tablets stored in an abandoned salt mine for long term archival. They also have ceramic micro-film, but one of their requirements is that the most important data can be read without any need for a computer, etc. hence the aforementioned larger tablets.
It’s relatively small scale though.
Our information density is wildly higher though, you can’t look at only media lifetime.
I was thinking about long-term historical traces (for which higher density tends to mean less lifetime), based on the dick drawings comment above; you’re right for other considerations though.