I would dearly love to see a ruggedized, solar-powered version of this device created for our descendants.
In case industrial civilization, well.. fails to go the distance. A Wikipedia-equivalent volume of paper is rather bulky and fragile.
In case industrial civilization, well.. fails to go the distance. A Wikipedia-equivalent volume of paper is rather bulky and fragile.
There was entire writeup about this (I think it was posted to HN) that I can no longer find and would be grateful if someone could point me at (my Google-Fu is failing me on this one) that of all the data storage mechanisms we have, paper is the one that we best know how to maintain and preserve. It's nowhere near as "bulky" as people make it out to be, and when done right and taken care of properly, can last centuries.
Here's a link that touches on the topic of preserving info for future generations, a great read: http://www2.library.ucla.edu/about/2483.cfm (What do you preserve? How do you do it? Why? For whom?)
The other article I was referring to earlier pointed out the pitfalls with all the modern "wonders" of storage and how woefully inadequate they would be for attempting to preserve knowledge/data in the big picture. Namely interfaces, specs, requirements, readers, electricity, and all the other goodies that silently play their role in powering your USB stick or bluray disc.
Paper is not the answer for a pauper with no room to call his own, nor for a factory hand living in a dormitory. There are many people alive right now for whom paper is already not the answer. But some of them could benefit from a Wikipedia "gameboy."
Yours or my paper library will carry knowledge into the ages quite well - until some vagrant burns it to warm himself in the wintertime. A piece of electronics, on the other hand - assuming we could make one that really lasts - could be passed down as an heirloom. And, should it begin to flicker out, the words could always be read off and set to paper.
Paper is good, but clay tablets FTW.
I'm no expert in this domain, so I'm not sure what this would look like, or if there's already a way to do this in a small enough form factor to be feasible and relatively inexpensive.