Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

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> The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years.

The British Domesday Book from 1086 is still referenced by historians for all sorts of purposes:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book

Not sure what kind of present-day data the historians of the future would be interested in.

> If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked […] The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long.

Well, paper would best be stored in a fairly dry place, so deserts may be a starting point.

Generally the only institutions / organizations that have managed to survive for centuries / millennia have been monasteries. Temples/churches have often been close to communities for public worship, but most religious traditions seem to have groups of individuals that were a bit more 'removed' from society at large. Organizing around such things could be attempted (a plot point in Stephenson's Anathem.)

Generally burying stuff and leaving clues so that an 'advanced enough' society can unbury it at some point may be another idea.

Lots of old books survive. They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy. Before the printing press, that was entirely by hand. one of the main purposes of those monasteries you mentioned is to copy relevant works for the next generation. Well, maybe I should say the next ten generations or however long books last depending on the local climate.

Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work. Some years ago a town near me had a big unburying of a vault they had saved for 50 years. In there was a brand new car complete with gas in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000. The gas was stale and unusable. The car was completely rusted the point where it couldn't be restored. The only answer that you can be confident of storing something is if someone every few years personally looks at it and verifies it is still in good shape and if not repairs it. Archaeologists can learn a lot from garbage and trash that was buried with no attempt to save it. However, archaeologists are also very aware of the limitations of what they can get. There is a lot they know they don't know because, well, this would not have been saved or been preserved.

> They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy.

Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.

> Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work.

So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.

> to make a copy, you need an original,

A lot of the classics we have today are copies of copies of copies. The Dead sea scrolls are the oldest known copy of the bible, and nobody believes they are originals. They are mostly interesting because they can help us track down where copies made a mistake and so the text we consider original today might be wrong. (but we don't know - there is also the possibility those scrolls were put hidden because when checking the copy they found mistakes and so put them where they wouldn't be used - not wanting to destroy the parts that were God's word)

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