Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com)

Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard: Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.

"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?

Comments

Anything important will be preserved

[vakuona]

The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.

The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.

The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.

Re:Anything important will be preserved

[Kjella]

The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented. The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.

I think so too, the sheer mass of data generated is so absurdly much higher that even if 0.1% survives it'd be more than a century ago. That said, say you have a global WWII-class war with 6 years of fighting, rationing, power failures, shortages of parts and maybe a decade or two until industry production recovers and people got time to prioritize their history we'd lose a lot of data. It doesn't have to be post-apocalyptic wasteland bad either, but you don't produce TB-size HDDs in your average workshop. That said, at some point you have to just accept that advanced civilization depends on
advanced civilization.

Re:Anything important will be preserved

[houghi]

And the opposite is true as well. Things that are not important will be forgotten. If need be, we re-invent them with the technology we have then.

e.g. we have no idea how the Egyptians build the pyrimids and yet we are able to build things that are much larger then that and not only some of them. A lot of them and we do it faster.

It is the idea that people have that
1) There is only one solution to a problem
2) There is only one person that can have an idea

Again with the pyramids: there are several ways that we think it could have been done. We just are not sure and one does not exclude the other. Several ideas already.
2) There are several places that have found out that the easiest way to make a hill is by starting with a sqare.

Another thing is that forgetting things will result in making new things, not just reusing the old things.

Imagine that we would be using the same building method as used for the pyramids, we would then still be using it. Instead we started to look for other solutions. If they were worse, we did not use them, if they were better, they made us forget the worse way.

Forgetting is a GOOD thing. See it as restarting instead of adapting the same code again and again. At a certain point starting all over is much better. Why? Because things will have changed. (I am aware that comparisons are not 100% interchangable.)

Is it interesting to know how the Vikings build the pyramids? Sure. Is it usefull for an archiitect building a new mall? Not really.
And at this moment we have so much infor,ation that we can't even figure out what is drivel and what is usefull. And saving everything because of that is just hoarding.

Durability vs. Storage density

[Sique]

It seems that there is an inverse proportionality between the durability of a storage medium and its storage density, and I don't know if we can overcome that easily, as we have the law of entropy working against us. A stone carving or a clay tablet can overcome hundreds and thousands of quantum events, and they will still be stone and clay. A papyrus starts to rot, when its molecules break up, and it gets brittle and is more easily destroyed. Printed paper is thinner and has smaller letters than a hand written papyrus and thus even small damage can erase whole words or paragraphs. And with a hard disk or flash memory, even single quantum events can erase or flip a bit, and a two bit error is already unrecoverable, and any more damage loses large swats of the file.

Re:He's Right

[zephvark]

Contrariwise... my family has left an immense amount of information. Boxes and boxes of pictures, some films (!), postcards, letters, college studies... I am planning to digitize all of it. In physical form, it takes an immense amount of room, can only be held by one person, and is not backed up. It will be much more flexible, useful, and safe as computer data.

Virtual machines for the win!

[Terje Mathisen]

We had this exact problem at a former place of employment, i.e. we had contract requirements to provide access to original oil field data for the 25-year lifetime of the field, the problem was that most of this data was in the form of seismic data locked into a specific version of the exploration sw.

The solution we came up with depended on making a virtual machine image of everything needed to run the original application & data, including license files and user databases, and then freeze the system clock: This way we could restart that image at any point in the future and as far as the sw would know it was still 2005.

We would still need regular maintenance, to make sure that newer versions of the virtualization platform could still run the original image. In the worst case we expected to have to add an additional virtualization layer, i.e. so we could run the 2005 sw inside a 2015 virtual machine which would run inside a 2030 VM host.

This approach has of course been used to good effect in order to save classic games.

Terje

Too many not too few

[Jon Peterson]

The issue isn't just that the media will decay, it's that the media is too cheap. There is no incentive to curate our documents, and we will end up with so many still in existence, no-one in future ages will have the inclination to wade through the rubbish.

When people had paper photographs, they soon accumulated boxes of albums, and by 1990, those holiday snaps from 1970 were kind of dusty and not worth keeping. So people chucked them out. But of course they looked through them first and kept a couple of photos, maybe even got those framed. All of which means that when they died in 2010, their kids had only maybe 100 photos to look through, and decide what was worth holding on to.

Now, our holiday snaps are uploaded to the cloud. They aren't a nuisance, and we never get rid of any. When we die, maybe our kids will be able to get a drive or an account key, or something, with 20,000 photos on. Do you really think they will do more than look at a few random ones, before adding them to their own 5,000 photos?

Same with our emails, our whatsapp messages, our blog posts.

The total amount of media from our age will still be significant - the sheer quantity produced ensures that much will remain. But what remains intact won't do so because of its significance to our age. We don't bury our most valuable items in the ground for safety, or lock them in huge chests, or keep them in safes.

Re:understanding quantity

[holophrastic]

Oh, heavily abbreviated (I'm Canadian, by the way):

if the mouth points down, it's a bottom-feeder, if it points up, it's a surface feeder, if it points straight, it's carnivorous.
if it has a dorsal fin, if it has thin fins, if it has big flippers, denotes its relative speed.
vertical tail fin, it lives in reeds, horizontal tail fin, it doesn't.
scales vs no-scales, eyes on the sides vs the on the top, big eyes vs small eyes.
belly-colour vs dorsal colour.

so really basic observations can give you a pretty good idea of whether or not it can attack, defend, move through tall plants or narrow coral, is often seen from underneath or is often seen from above, lives in darkness deep waters or shallow, moves fast or slow. Put it all together, and you've can come pretty close to exactly what it is and where it lives.

And if you're in Mr. Mawson's class, there was a quiz ten minutes after the lesson, just to prove that you weren't really paying any attention, so everyone failed every time, and knew exactly what they needed to study in time for the test next week.