Kepler's 400-year-old sunspot sketches helped solve a modern mystery
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Surely you’re joking. Physical records are notoriously fragile. They default to having a single copy and require intentional effort to create and distribute duplicates. They are frequently lost to fires, fading, physical decay, and even just being misplaced for generations.
Digital records have their own issues, but implying with a straight face that the default state of physical records is persistence is a bridge too far.
Water and fire are equally destructive to digital or analog. Library of Congress has chosen analog vinyl for long term storage over any digital format. I think you're putting way too much faith in digital and totally discounting analog.
For this purpose speed and capacity aren't as important because we've had great information density for relatively small file sizes for a long time now. A ridiculous amount of information can be stored in just plain old text files, especially if compressed. For video and audio, recordings in even just 128k AAC and 720p h.264 video would be a wonderful thing to have 100+ years from now; anything better would be a cherry on top.
Or just go for something like microfiche (or even ordinary-scale engravings) with OCR-friendly fonts.
Not to mention that accessing those records—finding them in the first place and searching through them—at any kind of scale is essentially completely prohibitive for most use-cases, many of them might as well not even exist until someone takes the effort to digitize them.
I have physical records from 2 years ago that can no longer be read.
Besides these, there have been huge amounts of written records that have used more perishable materials, like plant leaves, plant bark, wood, papyrus, wax etc.
Almost all of those have been lost.
In the past, carving stone or bronze was hard work, so it was avoided, except for the most important records. Also today, there are technologies to make digital records that could survive for many millennia, but due to their high cost they are used even less than stone carving was used in the ancient world.
We do have records from thousands of years ago, and the fact that we can read them is really cool! But, your argument that therefore analog is 'more reliable' is sketchy. It's true that we have many digital formats that can no longer be read today. But there a few things of note.
One, this isn't a fair comparison. We have analog records from thousands of years ago, yes, but we also have tons of missing ones. (Beowulf once had only one copy, and that was nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1700s. If someone hadn't been quick to rescue it, we could have no idea of Beowulf.) The vast majority is probably missing. A fairer comparison would be to invent a time machine and fast forward a few hundred years. If any file format from today is still readable, then that can be considered a success. Of course, absent a time machine, there's no real way to test this, but judging analog records only be survivors is flawed. (An incomplete list of books which we are aware of but don't have is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work)
Two, water and fire might be equally destructive. But if, in theory, all of the print copies of the books in this collection [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=158633464] get destroyed before digitization, then, so far as we can tell, they're gone. Forever. There's no way of recovering them. But if you can't access the file at HathiTrust anymore, for whatever reason (which might be more likely), there's a copy at the University of Illinois [https://digital.library.illinois.edu/items/bf8640e0-061b-013...] and at HathiTrust [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100008794]. And since HathiTrust has a mirror, in reality it would require three failing simultaneously.
Maybe a digital file is more likely to be unreadable or fail in some other way, but there are also many more copies. For a Project Gutenberg work to be inaccessible, all of the sites on this list [https://www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL] must fail (in reality, it's less, as many are hosted by the same group; but it's still two continents, four countries, and eight providers) and possibly/probably others. For a rare book collection that isn't digitized, it takes one fire.
- After the wheel was invented, humanity has never stopped building vehicles with wheels.
- Since the printing press was created, humanity has never lost the ability to mass-copy and distribute information.
- Since airplanes were invented, humans have never been unable to achieve flight.
I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to believe that humans as a whole will never lose the ability to read digital information in the future. Heck, I'd say it's the most likely outcome.
Humans learn from each other. Information "likes to spread". All of known history supports the idea that technology generally advances in one direction.
Better to be safe than sorry.
> - Since airplanes were invented, humans have never been unable to achieve flight.
This is 600 years and, depending on what you count as an airplane, about 150 years of history. On the scale of millennia, they don't say much about what we will always have.
"Humans" don't mean much in that context. How many countries could build a plane? France, US (albeit they start having reliability issues), China, Russia, India, Japan, and a few others. That list [1] gives only two East-Asian countries, one South Asian and one South American countries. Every other on the list is an European country or a derivative.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aircraf...
Achieving competitive warplanes could be difficult. So could making something with sufficient efficiency or reliability for regulated commercial use.
Many sufficiently motivated people have actually built their own planes since the knowledge of how to achieve heavier than air flight/aerofoils widely exists.
For large archives, volume determines the cost, because the archive needs to be maintained at constant temprature, humidity etc. Digital storage, being much more dense, costs less.
Architecturally, this will also mean that the further distance between points A and B in the digital archive will grow, I would claim roughly exponentially, slower than what happens in the analog archive. This will affect the costs in myriad ways, which I at the time of writing don't recall.
The pressed CD-ROMs/DVD-ROMs still have pits in the polycarbonate disc, even when the mirror is no longer reflective. Those could still be read with a more sophisticated microscope, e.g. by using phase contrast.
The recordable CD-Rs/DVD-Rs used an organic dye for storing the bits and after a long enough time that dye can be completely degraded and it can become impossile to read.
The rewritable CD-RWs/DVD-RWs store the bits in a layer that can be either amorphous or crystalline, with different reflectivities. After a long enough time, that layer can recrystallize, erasing the bits.
Of all the optical discs that have been available commercially, those with the longest archival time were the pressed CD-ROM with gold mirrors, where the only degradation mechanism is the depolymerization of the polycarbonate, which could make them fragile, but when kept at reasonable temperatures and humidities that should require many centuries.
There have been experiments with write-once optical memories where the bits are stored in an inorganic glass that should easily last for many millennia, but until now I have not heard of commercial products. In any case, none exist at an affordable price.
Writable CD/DVDs have a written shelf life of about 25 years before the layers start to deteriorate and the best ones have a max lifespan guarantee of 100 years. They do rot, just slowly. With a microscope you can of course stretch that a bit but they won't last forever.
Please consider printing this email out for posterity.
It still pays a small amount of interest (a bit over 13 Euros per year) provided that the bearer (currently the New York Stock Exchange) if they show up every few years to collect it.
IIRC, solar activity affects the level of charged particles hitting the upper atmosphere which in turn, affects the ratios of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. Traces of these variations can be found in the wood of trees that grew at the time. The tree rings provides dates for the growth.
In the ones that do, wouldn't there be enough thermodynamic diffusion within the tree trunk to obfuscate the true isotope levels in each ring?
The storms on May 11th were verified to have reached -800nt, so right at the bottom of the Carrington event estimates.
Interestingly, while there were a few minor easily fixed issues, the world as we know it did not end as some have said it would with a Carrington scale event.