this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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There is no "write and forget" solution. There never has been.
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts? No, we have only those that have been copied over and over in the course of the centuries. Historians knows too well. And 90% of anything ever written by humans in all history has been lost, all that was written on more durable media than ours.
The future will hold only those memories of us that our descendants will take the time to copy over and over. Nothing that we will do today to preserve our media will last 1000 years in any case.
(Will we as a specie survive 1000 more years?)
Still, it our duty to preserve for the future as much as we can. If today's historians are any guide, the most important bits will be those less valuable today: the ones nobody will care to actually preserve.
Citing Alessandro Barbero, a top notch Italian current historian, he would kill no know what a common passant had for breakfast in the tenth century. We know nothing about that, while we know a tiny little more about kings.
We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.
(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)
Yeah, I was going to say that we know that Ea-nasir's copper was shitty.
Obviously not everything from 1750 BC survived, but we do know that certain mediums are more likely to stand the test of time than others. Something physical with the writing carved in? That will probably last. Something with pigment on vellum, that won't be quite as good, but you can store a lot more information per kg. Something involving bits? That won't last even a quarter century. Something involving bits stored using magnetism and retrieved using mechanical motion? Good luck keeping that for even a decade.
But, the thing we've shown will 100% stand the test of time is keeping the information flowing, though at the cost of some degradation. In the past, this was one generation telling stories to the next. When that happens, not only does the information get passed on, the language used is subtly updated in time with the evolution of the language. You don't need to learn Akkadian cuneiform to read it, it's available in whatever the modern language is. Similarly, if digital files keep getting passed around, it doesn't matter if the original came on a floppy disk, and floppy disk readers are now gone. The file exists, stored in whatever medium is current. But, you get degradation with this process too. Music might be turned into mp3s with some data getting lost. Photos might be resized, cropped, recompressed, etc.
If I wanted something to be preserved exactly as-is for centuries, I'd carve it into a non-precious metal (so nobody melted it down). If I wanted something to be easily accessible for centuries, I'd try to share it as widely as possible to keep it "in motion" and in a format that was constantly up to date.