I believe most of the ancient Roman and Greek texts have survived not because we preserved the originals but because of the numerous copies and translations that all the following generations made. I can only dream of the storage capacity of a hard drive (or whatever will have replaced it) in 50 years, I am sure that preserving a substantial part of this data will be a modest burden.
I disagree. I think some future civilization looking back in time 1000 years (for example) will likely only have physical artifacts to interpret, and it's likely they would get much of it wrong.
Imagine some future archaelogist making the first discovery of the shell of a old floppy disk. Without context, this would probably become the equivalent of "black ceremonial item".
I think we are nearing the point where someone will come up with a solid format storing bytes, in known encoding, for a quite long time. The incentives are certainly in place - libraries specializing in data storage (e.g for hollywood film master copies, etc), are to my understanding spending a considerable buck in updating theis storage scheme every so few years. Despite how many megahours of youtube data gets uploaded daily, I'm fairly sure there is a market for relatively low capacity but longterm viable storage once someone invents it.
There is such a thing as 5d memory storage, which I understand basically uses etched glass and is thus super mega stable, although I'm not too sure about the costs involved in heavy use for things like day to day archiving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
A market, maybe, but do you think it will be a big one? Where is the incentive to spend a lot of money on this problem?
Existing libraries already have trouble with low-quality books and film that doesn’t survive very well. Only the most important artifacts tend to be copied to archival-quality material.
Why would digital artifacts be any different? And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff? Look at how much bitrot there is on most web pages after just 10 or 20 years. Even setting aside physical bitrot, there’s plenty of semantic data loss that nobody really cares enough about to fix.
Finally, despite all the above, let’s say we do come up with a cheap and practical way to store digital data for very long periods of time. Unless it’s very compact, it will use an appreciable amount of energy and material resources to store stuff. Which tiny fraction of the massive tidal wave of digital content should be archived, and who gets to decide?
"And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff?"
To my understanding there are institutions including the library of congress whose main purpose is preserving information. Not all information, of course.
You must have a terrible opinion of archaeologists if you think that only a thousand years from now they won't be able to tell a data storage device from a cerimonial item.
No, I just don't trust that the corporate entities and governments that own the hardware storing vast amounts of non-public data to last for the next 1000 years, and that when they cease to exist, much of this information will be lost. I was being a bit hyperbolic with my quip about the ceremonial item. Barring a total collapse, you are probably correct that they would understand that it is a storage device. I guess it just depends on how likely you think it is there would be a new dark age within the next 1000 years...
The dark age really wasn't - not in terms of knowledge retention anyway. There was a decrease in population in europe which caused all sort of demographic maladies which caused the economic undevelopment we all associate with that period of europe, but the knowledge itself was preserved in books.
Yes, it's much easier to learn a foreign script than to decipher a forgotten disk format where bytes are nanometers in size - but given the vast utility computing devices provide us, we need to fall pretty deep and far from where the current historical development is taking us to forget computational devices as a civilization entirely.
If we have academia - and there is very little reason to think we won't - I'm sure there will be departments of digital information preservation who specialize in extracting cat videos (and probably digital physical simulacrums of the cutest cats) from the vast array of storage material our generation and the next will store.
The question is this: At which point will youtube seize to exist? If it won't there is no reason to think it cannot forward the data it stores to the future millenia. I mean, catholic church is over a millenia old with archives stretching as far. Is there some reason (barring some hollywoodesque global calamity) youtube could not reach the same age?
The constant churn of new video formats is one possible reason. If YouTube doesn’t convert all their old videos, they may become effectively unplayable (see for example how many 80s and 90s AV formats have vanished). But even if they do convert all their old videos, repeated transcoding could gradually turn them into mush anyway.
Those problems could certainly be avoided or worked around if YT takes sufficient care, but maybe they won’t have the right incentives to care continuously for the next 1000 years. I think it’s a much harder challenge than preserving paper and vellum artifacts.
>The constant churn of new video formats is one possible reason. If YouTube doesn’t convert all their old videos, they may become effectively unplayable
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).
