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Comment by lai-yin | Hacker News Reader

The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?

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Burn it all on CDs and leave them for ten years in wet environment.

Joking aside, our methods of recording information are hellishly vulnerable. This comes with the density of record. A clay tablet from Mesopotamia does not carry more than 2 kB of info, but 4000 years have gone by and it is still readable.

We still can't read Linear A, the language of Minoan Greece.

Forgotten protocols are a thing until today. AFAIK we have problems deciphering the recorded transmissions of Lunokhod, the Soviet probe that landed on the Moon. Everyone who knew the code is dead.

Would be interesting to have a catalogue of endangered protocols/knowledge bases - similar to the endangered species list.

Bit of a tangent: just occurred to me that part of the story arc for the show 'Mr. Robot' is hackers trying to erase an entire knowledge base - the debt history of billions of people. The protagonists try to achieve this goal by peaceful means, but...okay I'm going to stop spoiling it's an awesome show check it out.

In Mr Robot the goal was to destroy a data base, not a knowledge base. Data != knowledge.

Fair point!

The OAIS reference model was created to address the issue in space data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_Syst...

I think the most present danger for books and preservation efforts today is of course deletion of digital records, but for books we have more printed copies everywhere than ever.

But, the danger is really high that they will be all thrown out alongside of the yellowed Harry Potter books.

While very little of the writings of Carthaginians has survived, the language itself (Phoenician/Punic) is well understood because a very close relative, which was mutually intelligible with it, has, however, survived: Hebrew. So if anything did turn up, we'd be able to read it.

Contrast this with another ancient language: Etruscan. Although we have a number of longish texts in the language, we can't translate much of them. Etruscan has left no descendants, and Emperor Claudius's books on the language haven't survived. There is one bilingual text of more than a few words (the Pyrgi tablets). The other language is Phoenician. We can read that.

Not long. Lets assume we lose the ability to manufacture modern IT equipment. How long do we have? Estimated live expectancy of HDD, SDD and tapes?

Most digital data would be lost within 10-20 years. Maybe sooner. We could at least try to pint out wikipedia.

There’s this scene in Rollerball (1975) where James Caan visits the most powerful supercomputer on Earth. The lead scientist candidly admits that they lost all the computers with XIII century data. I never forgot that scene.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...

I think it's possible with the rise of more and more "successful" dictatorships the Internet will become the domain of the state and we'll probably lose a lot very very quickly.

So... that happening.

I'm long on paper.

Paper, meet fire.

Seriously, though, there have been a lot of instances throughout history where scrolls and books have been burned at the order of the state. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the burning of the Library of Alexandria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

So I don't think paper is necessarily a "better" alternative.

> Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries

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