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Norway's Doomsday Vault Will Now Store and Protect the World's Data (wired.co.uk)
Doomsday may be closer than ever, but thanks to the Arctic World Archive, at least your data could survive the looming apocalypse. From a report: Norway is already the home to the Global Seed Vault, a frozen ark for 1.5 million seeds to avoid their extinction, and now the Arctic World Archive aims to do the same for your data -- in the same disused mine in the same mountain on the island of Svalbard, famous for its polar bear population. Run by a small Norwegian archiving company called Piql, the World Arctic Archive will store key documents, books and other files on photosensitive film held in protective boxes, a technique Piql says it's tested to survive for at least 500 years and believes will last for 1,000. That longevity is helped by the storage location. More on this here.
If you're encoding data on film, but you still need a digital camera or computer to read it, you still might be screwed and the data might be inaccessible. By microfilming the source docs, all you need is a light source and a magnifying glass -- both of which are decidedly analog and low-tech compared to the method being used for this project. Plus sliver halide microfilm lasts at least 500 years if properly stored. Either you're taking the digital component out of it, or you're not. Having a digital requirement in there might make the data inaccessible in a post-electricity, post-digital world post-apocalypse.
noone is going to take an army to go to Arctic to destroy seeds, but they might to destroy an Archive, and while they are there they'll trample the seeds...
It goes both ways. If the day comes we actually need the seeds, whoever is fighting over them isn't going to give a shit about a couple of books. Every additional target you put in one location increases the risk to each of the others.
Nope, no sig
If you fully understand the behavior of a material, you should be able to give a pretty good swag at it's lifetime. Nothing magical occurs, the material loses an average of xxx molecular connections upon exposure to xxx photons, or xxx heat, or whatever. You can test using various acceleration environments and extrapolate based on what you learn. If half of an iron bar rusts out over a month, you don't need to wait another month to know that the rest of it will rust away in a month.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Languages change. 500 years from now, will people be able to understand our current writing?
For the languages of the data that is stored in Norway, I suggest that they store a dictionary in those languages.
They should also store books on how to learn those languages. They might store books like the ones I used when I studied German in high school. Those books were completely in German. In the beginner's book, the first page had a small red rectangle, a small blue rectangle, and a small green rectangle, etc. Next to each rectangle was the German word for that color. So we learned those colors in German. Then the book showed the picture of hands pointing to rectangles of various colors. Next to them were the German words for "This is red.", or "This is blue.", etc. So we learned how to make those simple sentences. Then the book built on that, making the sentences more complicated, and introducing more words.