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Comment by atdrummond | Hacker News Reader

Ask how well this worked out for Scientology, who set out to do this with L. Ron Hubbard's works. Their efforts were essentially for naught as they used a now deprecated type of LaserDisc. (https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-scientologys-secret-bun... https://tonyortega.org/2013/08/31/the-history-of-scientology...)

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This is why engraved stone tablets remain the standard storage medium for religious texts. Easy to read anywhere, especially if you use a burning bush for lighting.

They should come with a cave for storage, else wind will erode the inscriptions. Running water will destroy them too. Even the cave may collapse on it.

A continuous revelation is more sustainable

Yep, plenty of gravestones are weathered to the point of illegibility after 100 years. Pick that mineral carefully. Or maybe go with a ceramic?

Oral tradition could be good too if only the authors would ever bother to add error correction. Unfortunately this revolutionary distributed tech is held back by lazy implementations.

A well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage. In that case Hubbard was on the right track even if his creation wasn't.

Just ask for another download.

Aside from religions, that was essentially my other thought: send data via lasers aligned to stars such that the light was bent back to earth for download. Of course then you have the Betamax problem...

The entropy is pretty bad though, both in data and the interpretation of the data through medium translation.

Another example of long term data storage is oral folklore traditions. Some Australian Aboriginal myths, for example, are claimed to contain references to geological events that date back 40k years.

The geological events are actually backed up with real science. Australian Aborigines are the only human culture whose stories have withstood the test of time - tens of thousands of years, in fact.

The reason is, they used cryptographic techniques (in their kinship system) to validate the stories as they were told among differing tribes and identify alterations.

> A well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage.

An example might be useful; it seems to me that religions inherently distort the message of their founders. For example, most of Buddhist teaching was developed long after the Buddha died. Christians have had multiple doctrinal conferences to determine what is the "true doctrine". Islam has been divided since shortly after the death of the Prophet.

Jewish scholarship has been refining its view of the Torah for literally thousands of years.

I think a useful example is in the book "How the Irish Saved Civilization." The basic premise is that Christian monasteries isolated from the post-Roman disorder preserved knowledge and knowledge tradition that reemerged later. Stating this is not intended as unqualified praise for the book or to deny the role of Orthodox, Syriac and Islam in knowledge preservation or to say that the deconstruction of the Roman Empire was a bad thing.

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

From what I can see here looks like they've also archived Hubbard's works using text and simple recording methods powered by solar and mechanical; https://www.scientology.tv/series/inside-scientology/archiva...

Are they for naught? All they need to do is have a handful of laserdisc players around; your average clever nerdy arduino-loving teenager could probably get one working in the space of a day or two, likely by cleaning optics and maybe doing some re-capping and lubricating this or that.

They are usually are controllable via RS-232 or IEEE-488 and output any of several video formats. All extremely common, well documented protocols. Due to them using analog(!) to store the video, they're remarkably tolerant of defects. As someone who grew up watching a lot of rental laserdiscs with family, it was impressive how much damage a beat up rental disc could have and still play fine.

Man, the memories from that. A laserdisc machine spinning up was the most sci-fi thing EVER to a young kid.

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