Memory of Mankind: All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi...
http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/05/13/payback-machine-int...
This includes books, pamphlets, cassettes, etc. It would be possible to transfer these to stable mine-based storage (which is available commercially) or bury them in the North African desert, which is dry enough to preserve the hair of mummies for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II#Mummy
Humanity is simply amazing... we have come so far. A king who died ~3500 years ago was flown thousands of kilometers on a plane and was issued his own passport!
> bury them in the North African desert
How viable do you think would it be to setup a business that provides storage space and tracking capability in the Tunisian desert? I'm from Tunisia btw, and I think government seed funds would be happy to fund something like that. The biggest issue is who would actually pay for a service like that?
There's definitely a commericial market for storing paper documents for decades, maybe up to a century. This is currently addressed by existing mine-based storage companies, among other things. Plus mines are secure: There's often only one way in and the storage is surrounded by rock.
Burying things under sand and rock in the desert obviously works for millennia; the ancient Egyptians were onto something.
Correct, but the transition was from an autocracy to a fledgling democracy; the opposite would be more concerning. Security and infrastructure are both improving. Foreign investments are on the rise.
This is the absolute best time to be setting up a foreign business in Tunisia, since the government will basically pay you money to do so. Oh, and skilled labor is extremely cheap and the currency is at a low right now. The only issue is that English is a 3rd language - French is more common - but Tunisians are starting to adopt English more as it opens more doors, especially on the internet.
> Switzerland, in contrast, hasn't been invaded for 500 years IIRC, despite being literally in the middle of two world wars.
Great, but the labor costs and bureaucratic overhead alone would be prohibitively high - 500 years of stability doesn't come for free! Another issue for such a business specifically is that Switzerland is landlocked. Tunisia's access to the sea is excellent, and it has a number of ports spread from north to south (the beaches are amazing btw!). Tunisia is also very close to Europe, and is the northernmost country in Africa.
The advantage Tunisia has over its North African neighbors (Morocco, Algeria, and Libya) is that sea access is better, and getting to the desert is easier as Tunisia is smaller in size.
Alas, Egypt just recently went from a (fledgling) democracy under Morsi to a military autocracy under Sisi.
Egypt is a regional power, so they wouldn't let it off as easily. Plus, I recall that Morsi made some questionable decisions throughout his (short) term as president.
I wish my Egyptian brothers and sisters the best.
The issue is less "how's it going right now" and more "how will it be in a few centuries".
The current world super power was colonized by a foreign force just 300 years back. That same occupying force can now be crushed by said super power.
The two great powers of the 15th century are now each facing a severe economic crisis.
The past is not a reliable indicator of the future.
I'm of the mind that burying such records in a highly-conspicuous site on the Moon might be a better solution. Much less risk to geological processes or tomb raiders; if you can get that far from Earth then you might be responsible enough to deal with the archive.
Seems a little bit optimistic; could you imagine if the Cold War's space race had the additional prize of an archive of advanced alien technology?
Oh, I concede that there is no guarantee that an organization or country advanced enough to launch a mission to the Moon would be responsible custodians of the information (alternate timelines where Germany or the Soviet Union land men on the Moon come to mind). But they might be less inclined to destroy it outright instead of seeing what they can use for themselves.
The best we can hope for is to make data available to the future; what they do with it is ultimately out of our hands.
Edit: Just noticed your last remark. What does responsibility have to do with being able to access an archive of human knowledge and culture?
None of this means that multiple, redundant archives cannot be created. I just think that the Moon offers a unique level of protection from those would would destroy or otherwise degrade such a collection.
It's very difficult to design a library that can survive the waves of human political conflict for millennia.
of course, you'd have to be ok with photocopies instead of originals. for the purpose of preserving information, i dont see a problem with photocopies.
And redundancy? Around 240BC, the first Qin emperor in China had all non-technical books burned. We have much of the oldest Chinese literature because it was restored from memory after his death.
If someone wants to burn it all, and can get enough power, they will find a way.
So you feel that even if we had archives buried in bunkers underground, on 6 continents, that somebody could still destroy all of it? I hear what you're saying about if they can get enough power, I just don't see anyone succeeding in taking over the entire world. I guess I'm an optimist :P
Really? Russia, Japan, the fall of the Ottoman empire, the creation of the state of Israel and its ongoing repercussions, the start of a century of US involvement in South America to protect the Panama Canal and other assets, Mussolini, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco were not enough for you? China lost 14 million people to WWII...
WWII is pretty much singlehandedly responsible as a turning point for the ongoing mess in South America, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Wow. Just to put that in perspective, it was a desert when North America was still joined to Europe, India wasn't and Australia was an Antarctic appendage:
Then the American Southwest was grasslands, until gold rush and westward expansion including cattle and sheep, resulting in overgrazing and irreversible changes.
The Gobi was widely inhabited in prehistoric times. People arrived and wham! desert. Its still expanding today, one of the fastest-growing deserts in the world. Because, people.
The Namib is indeed old. Its also almost the smallest desert - #25 on a list of 27 worldwide. So lets grant an exception there.
Also roads going through deserts does not prove much since they could just connect oasis or move goods across the desert without people living within it.
The Sahara itself also is fairly old[0]. Of course its total extent is variable and subject to natural and man-made climate change and other human influence. But there is a huge difference between human activity creating a desert and influencing its extent or aridity.
Most deserts are naturally created through the rain shadow[1] and other precipitation-reducing effects of geographic features.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhongshi_Zhang/publicat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow
I've worked in projects with archivists in a few US government entities --there's hardly anything for more recent administrations. Between easy deletion/loss of data and the difficulty of maintaining access to file formats over time, lots of stuff will vanish.
If you ignore digital media, and compare the number of physical books produced, there are many thousands of times more produced now than there were 500 years ago.
You're right in the sense that a lot will be lost, and that we should strive to do better, but in terms of comparison to the past we're preserving an exceptional amount of knowledge.
What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here.
I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.
That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.
That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.
Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've managed to dig up.
Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to destruction of our civilization.
And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".
My wife worked for a municipal water utility which possesses very old (early 19th century) records that shed light into how certain developments in the city's history progressed. Today that equivalent information is all electronic and most will be inaccessible in a decade or less.
Getting insight into how people thought in the past will be harder for this era. Letters are replaced by electronic communication that is difficult to save and store casually. Things like annual reports are electronic only.
Lost Greek works weren't lost because they weren't recorded. They were destroyed by the fall of that civilization and the wars and chaos that followed.
Try to find one of those today.
The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on being able to make many copies and modifications, too.
People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when clearly the knowledge was almost there. My pet theory about this involves walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be truly accessible to a huge group of people.
Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites. In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their data.
If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your services as possible. Don't just use Spotify, have music on your hard drive. Don't just use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive.
I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life, hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending supervolcano eruption.
The problem with this is that if there are enough people around that remember about this and have the spare time and means to go there an dig an opening again, then it's probably not needed because society still exists.
If a some global catastrophe happens that wipes out much of our our modern records and knowledge, then "Oh hey, there's some good books under a mountain in another continent" is going to be pretty low on the list of things that's preserved through oral lore.
I think that knowledge would become the new gold/buried treasure in such a world. They who have the knowledge wins, and it will become potentially far more valuable than any stash of Gold.
If that is true for such a post apocalyptic future, then the lore of the buried treasure in the salt mine will probably spread and many will seek it out.
"Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level." --yourapostasy [HN user] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824828
Books and scientific journals could be the first to be encoded. Reputable newspapers could be next. Maybe the entire library of congress. Social media data can be encoded dead last or not at all since it would not help in rebuilding a civilization. We do not need to encode every tweet.
The problem is that future thinkers need to know it exists, and where to start. Both problems can be solved with a larger, more obvious medium. And in fact, you could have several mediums at different scales between big, billboard sized stuff and the ultimate substrate, and each level describes what you need to do to access the next level down. The billboard(100m) points out the library (1m) describes how to read the microfiche (1mm) describes how to build the TEM (1nm) which you use to read everything else.
Of course, that might very well be far too much information. Certainly most of it will be useless to most observers - just like it is today. Well, we could do worse than just storing Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg, and YouTube. But I digress.
And using clay? This seems very sentimental. Are there not more long-lasting mediums? Especially with laser printing where we can quickly engrave knowledge without the risk of human error or time-consuming manual labor.
Ceramic is very stable during time. All modern media that you might think (LP? tapes? Optical disks?) require some special instrument to recover the information, other than simply looking at it (perhaps using some microscope).
Paper degrades. Plastic degrades, in general. Metals rust. But stones and ceramics tend to be very durable, including against microorganisms and chemicals. They just don't withstand mechanical forces, like a hammer. But anyone willing to use a hammer would use any other thing to destroy other medias, too.
There are many better kinds of ceramic available, even glass would be a better choice.