preserving human knowledge in case of Extinction Level Event (ELE, ELE's)

[TinderBox (UK)]

Extinction Level Event, means their is a possiblility of extinction, but if we are well prepared.

some people might survive.

have you not seen the film "deep impact".

people all round the world were in bunkers.

regards.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

Re: preserving human knowledge in case of ELE.

CDRom and DVDs are non magnetic storage medium, so everything saved there, such as your vacation photos should be fine...

Thus far the history of digital storage would seem to show that digitizing anything will mean that statistically it will have a real storage life shorter than almost any other method(s) that man has come up with to preserve information.

Some municipalities have huge databases created over years of input that can't be accessed because of hardware obsolescence. Their total working lifespan amounted to no more than a few decades.

CDRs and DVDs will just be initials in a few years -- they will be totally eclipsed and forgotten. Aside from obsolescence, an aluminum eating fungus was found in Panama a few years ago that lives very well on data.

Closer to home, (my home, anyway) something as simple as Katrina destroyed bazillions of CDs and DVDs. Flood waters alone came close to destroying 100% of burnt CDs and DVDs. Commercial disks faired better but not by a great deal in terms of the reliability required for the task stipulated in this thread. Just yesterday a friend showed me a commercial music CD he recovered from his house after the flood. He still had it because the first cut would still play. When he held it up to the light it looked like a colander, it had so many holes in the foil.

Some older audiophiles may remember that the old vinyl LPs under the VERVE label had a great reputation for being a high quality product. In my friend's extensive CD collection that went through the flood not one commercially produced VERVE CD could be recovered.

 

[drizzle]

Re: preserving human knowledge in case of ELE.

Thus far the history of digital storage would seem to show that digitizing anything will mean that statistically it will have a real storage life shorter than almost any other method(s) that man has come up with to preserve information.

See my earlier post for a counter example. Digitizing actually increases the likelihood of preserving information. It's how you store the digitized info that makes the difference.

 

[idleprocess]

Re: preserving human knowledge in case of ELE.

I expect the flood waters and wind were similarly destructive to paper records, photographic negatives, etc - although some fraction might have been recoverable if they were not scattered.

Digital means high-density and ease of duplication. It also means a lifetime of maintenance. Given that duplication is so cheap and easy, it would be a wise choice to make multiple backups and distribute them about to prevent total loss. Choosing a mix of formats (such as digital, microfilm, archival-qualilty hardcopies) might prove to be the best choice. There's no such thing as a perfect archival format - just a matter of how you want to maintain it.

I don't think the danger of hardware and software obsolecense/extinction is anywhere near so great now as it was when computing was in its infancy. There were some early losers - proprietary disk/tape formats and long-forgotten database standards, as well as some winners. I've poured through .DBF files nearly 20 years old using contemporary spreadsheet applications. ASCII/unicode textfiles, CSV files, and the more enduring image formats will probably be supported for decades to come. Computing is not so forgetful as it used to be.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

Re: preserving human knowledge in case of ELE.

Drizzle and Idle,

I guess I was being too literal -- just another of my many extremes. Historically, digital media has such a brief record that it cannot credibly compete with any other storage medium that has been around long. While floods may destroy books, books may also survive. I own a few books over 100 years old. They have not only survived my very unfriendly-to-books climate and Katrina but at least as importantly, the original interface still exists to extract the data. I doubt that the information on today's CDs and DVDs will casually be extracted from them by any but a handfull of people 100 years from today -- even if they were stored in such a way that they would still somehow be in pristine condition at that time.

While digital storage is more reliable than it was 20 years ago -- how much more reliable is it? Three times as reliable? Ten times? How reliable does it have to be? I ax ya.

The punched mylar tape would be great but how many readers are there, or how many would there have to be?

As I see it, aside from obsolescense, the greatest challenge to writing an enduring digital standard is the simple fact that all of today's digital standards are written by owners of huge blocks of IP and because of that they are all hosed at the starting gate. Those who impose digital standards on the world do not want universal compatability -- there is far more money in chaos. Even if DVDs weren't eclipsed with the next new thing, there would still be anything but one standard for archiving DVDs. Soon DVDs will be replaced by higher density optical media that will also be very similar and yet very different from other competing products.

So that makes three problems that digital storage has to overcome to be viable, IMO. Media, hardware and storage standards. I guess I should admit that I think that digital would probably be the answer. And perhaps universiality is not the right direction, either.

Idle -- Amazingly, people have actually been salvaging VHS tapes that were under flood water (salt water, etc) for three weeks. If the tape was played to the end and not rewound (aka -- tight pack, tail out) the water could be drained and the tape dried and transferred to a new body. The water couldn't penetrate the tight pack deeply enough to wet the inside of the roll and damage the media. I'm not suggesting that we should use VHS as our enduring media -- I just thought it was really interesting.

 

[drizzle]

You make a good point Sub_Umbra about being able to read the tape. A person could read the dots manually. It would be time consuming but could be done. Your other point of acually understanding the code is a good one.

There is an interesting similar argument that oral traditions actually preserve meaning better than writing. The idea is that as the information is passed down from generation to generation through the repeated telling of stories, the actual words change with the language to preserve the intended meaning. With writing, the words don't change and it is up to the succeeding generations to remember what the words meant at the time of the writing.

 

[B@rt]

Br@t! what ? are you reading entire threads again? how could you..

Sometimes I surprize myself... :nana:

 

[TinderBox (UK)]

know matter how well we preserve information.

the process of getting the information back into peoples heads is the difficult part.

if the human brain is a type of computer, and we could find the way the information is stored.

their must be a quicker way to educate people.

regards.

 

[MScottz]

The solution is simple - strive to protect and preserve the person we collectively feel is the best of our citizenry. In our current time, this person is obviously George W. Bush. With George protected in an underground bunker, well prepared to emerge and spread his misunderestimated knowledge to the remaining citizenry of the world, what more could we ask or hope for the future of the human race?

Getting a little too political with this. There are those of us that strongly disagree wiht you yet are not able to post our thoughts without getting in trouble for it......

 

[dragoman]

I read a book once, called "On the Beach" which was set in Australia after a global nuclear exchange. The people there are the last survivors because prevailing winds have kept the fallout in the Northern Hemisphere until now, when it starts invading and killing the Southern Hemisphere.

A group of people were inscribing vast amounts of text onto metal plates, then sealing the metal plates inside of thick glass and storing them in the caves of the mountains.

I would think that method would be fairly durable storage......just take up alot of room.

dragoman

 

[TedTheLed]

I was just thinking about something like that; I love those thin copper plates they sell to mark gardens with. You write on them with a ballpoint which presses a physical line into the soft metal..

But is there enough time to transcribe all my posts onto metal by then?

 

[Mednanu]

As the most likely survivors of such an event would be sea creatures, and some of the oldest ( which also suggests being some of the most survivable sea creatures ) are sharks, I think we should combine the 'metal-plate' idea with a risk-adverse, non-centralized storage strategy ( ie - all of the knowledge shouldn't be stored in the same place, in case that area gets hardest hit by the ELE event ). With that being said, here's my idea:



All human knowledge should be kept on titanium metal plates....stapled to shark fins ! The titanium will resist corrosion from sea water, and the swimming sharks will make sure that all of the knowledge stays in motion at all times and won't likely be wiped out en-masse. It also provides a barrier to just anyone getting the knowledge ( as the shark may just eat the researcher while he/she tries to retrieve the metal plate ), thereby ensuring that those who seek the knowledge must work hard for it, and hopefully be wise enough to use it constructively once they have had to expend all of the effort to wrestle the shark for the knowledge. Lastly, it turns the hunt for knowlege into an easter-egg like treasure hunt ! Think of it. We've just found the shark for CD technology, but still need to find the iPod shark and the CD-Rom shark before we can use those for what we really want.....TUNES to hunt the sharks by ! See - it's all interconnected and so completely ties the search for knowledge together in such a unique ( and FUN ) fashion.


I'll be right back. It's time for my medication again and the doctors say that if I don't take it regularly, I start coming up with crazy thoughts...but hey, what do they know anyways....

 

[TedTheLed]

:lolsign: Mednanu I think you have just brought "jumping the shark" to a whole new level of meaning.

 

[idleprocess]

I can't argue with Sub_Umbra about the past reliability of digital storage when computing was in its infancy. It has a poor track record with propritary hardware rapidly coming and going along with the requisite software ... nevermind the rapid disappearance of entire systems architectures.

I'm not suggesting that computing is yet mature, but the pace of, er, "extinction" seems to be slowing greatly. There is sufficient investment in CD technology that the format should be readable for some time to come. You can pay a pretty penny for "archival quality" burnable media that should last a decade or so on the shelf in a climate-controlled environment. But computer technology is constantly changing, so you can't file-and-forget digital information so easily lest it be perfectly preserved in some unreadable format/medium.

The conditions for long-term digital archives are quite different from phsyical media such as paper records, photographic negatives, etc. One must constantly maintain digital media - ensure it can be read every few years and copy it to new media (perhaps even new types of media) regularly as it wears our or as a precaution against loss. This is routinely done in the corporate world with static (yet important) data on magnetic media. Ease of duplication is a distinct strength of digital media vs analog media, where one must typically put a great deal of effort into producing a perfect master copy which must endure forever. Both methods require good storage conditions, but due to the ease of making perfect digital copies, one can has more margin with environmental conditions for digital and the option of multiple copies in different locations.

Now ... if society goes down the crapper and our industrial/information economy completely fails, odds are you're going to be a might bit short on the requisite gizmos to read digitized information as opposed to the versatile Mk.I human eyeball, so maybe physical archives aren't a bad idea for the really important stuff.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

It's OT but I can't help myself. When I first started reading this thread it reminded me very much of another question somewhat similar to this a few years ago.

The premise was that we finally (somehow) had a sane repository for hazardous nuclear waste -- some of which would be fatal to humans for 500,000 years.

The question was, assuming that the containment technology was up to the task to run for the entire duration, how do you mark the site KEEP OUT in a manner that people will be able to understand for 500,000 years?

I know it's not the same but some of the elements are compareable.

 

[Mednanu]

... [if] we finally (somehow) had a sane repository for hazardous nuclear waste -- some of which would be fatal to humans for 500,000 years...assuming that the containment technology was up to the task to run for the entire duration, how do you mark the site KEEP OUT in a manner that people will be able to understand for 500,000 years?

I'd say that there is an easy solution to this problem as well. Refering to the train of 'logic' originally espoused within my prior post ( two spots above this ), I'd say that the solution to this problem is obvious :

...."Sharks with frickin' laser beams, attached to their heads !"


I'm sorry I had to visit the shark theme twice, but you people flat out made me do it.

 

[ledlurker]

During the year 2000 celebrations there were several 1000 year time capsules that were created. the decision was made to laser etch metal plates( I forgot the alloy) that would be readable with a magnifying glass. The first plate had full size etching that could be read and interpreteted by symbols on how to intepret the basic science to make a magnifying glass. The big problem the scientist identified would be the interface mechanism and if people 1, 5, or 25,000 years in the future would be able to understand the language. So the first several plates would have to have normal size etching to teach the language and how to build the user interface.

Don't forget that Egyptian writing went unreadable for centuries until the Roseta Stone was found and deciphered, and that was only on a time scale of about 5000 years.

 

[TedTheLed]

.... <snipped>.....
Don't forget that Egyptian writing went unreadable for centuries until the Roseta Stone was found and deciphered, and that was only on a time scale of about 5000 years.

yeah..and you know what those guys said...







umm ..... "..no painting left and right hands.." ?

 

[drizzle]

yeah..and you know what those guys said...







umm ..... "..no painting left and right hands.." ?

:huh2:
Oh no! It's happened already. The language has evolved to the point that I have no idea what Ted the Led just said.

 

[TedTheLed]

:lolsign: ok I edited a little, does it help?

..another clue; ever look at Egyptian painting?

see how they paint people?

(for a couple thopusand years if you painted anything any differently ie. without two right hands the pharoah chopped your head off, or buried you alive or chopped off your left arm, or what ever..)

so..what information did the Rosetta Stone enable us to read that is such valuable to us today? I'm just asking..
:shrug: