Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data…
As intriguing as the idea is, we have to admit it smacks of a publicity stunt more than an earnest act of preservation. Even if the data is secure, are the robots the new points of failure? What’s to protect them from fires, floods, EMPs, and all the other threats? What about the readers, which are delicate lasers driven by algorithms? In all likelihood, any explorers in the year 12,000 that might stumble onto the remains of the Global Music Vault would just display it in a museum as a collection of crystal coasters.
I was asking myself similar questions to these, alongside even more basic details like, "What if the future computer systems simply aren't compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it's even recognized as storage media to test)?" It's the deeply fascinating problem all long-term information storage/transmission faces regarding future comprehensibility.
“What if the future computer systems simply aren’t compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it’s even recognized as storage media to test)?”
We've reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we'll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000's of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.
Think of what modern archeologists would give to have the equivalent of a wikipedia archive from 10,000 years ago - imagine the colossal amounts of grant funding that would be thrown at the problem if we even suspected such a thing was within reach.
Of course all the other issues about keeping the actual system safe for 10k years are totally valid, but you have to start somewhere, and getting a data storage system that can last that long even in perfect conditions is the necessary first step.
We’ve reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we’ll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000’s of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.
I saw another reply mention similar, and I see where you're both coming from, but seeing another reply in this vein has encouraged me to ask the question the other reply inspired which is: what if you lack the fragments needed to reverse engineer/reconstruct a means to access the information?
Chances are slim, and to be clear here, I'm by no means knocking this development, as I find it really exciting, but I also enjoy thinking through some of the different potential points of failure. Not from a cynical/pessimistic perspective, but because it's a compelling challenge and puzzle. How much else alongside this specific media may need to survive so that it may remain accessible, directly or indirectly, y'know?
That's as cool and fun to consider as the new storage media itself to me! Come to think of it, maybe I really should look into some kind of archival/museum jobs considering that...
Might as well ask what's indicative of stone tablets from millennia ago being data to us now? These things aren't discovered and studied in a vacuum. They operate within context - where the items were found, their similarity to other better understood things, known history of data storage, etc etc.
Given enough time and disruption, sure, all context could be lost, but if that's the case, I'd assume figuring out what the weird glass cube thing is would be the least of their problems.
"So they told me that, according to the most advanced theories and techniques in every field, based on extensive theoretical research and experimentation, through analysis and comparison of multiple proposals, they did find a way to preserve information for about one hundred million years. And they emphasized that this was the only method known to be practicable: carving words into stone"
Glass is actually more of a very slow moving liquid than a solid. You can see this on windows that are hundreds of years old, e.g. in churches. They will be thicker on the bottom because part of the glass flowed down.
This is awesome, I was talking about this with some friends, debating what is truly the best way to store data for long term (on the scale of thousands of years)
Backing up all of human knowledge and history onto such plates actually seems like a worthy endeavor.
Imagine if we had such detailed records about civilizations thousands of years ago!
We have demonstrated time and time again that if you have a bunch of data unencrypted, it is actually quite trivial to reverse engineer it and decipher it.
Dead sea scrolls, Rosetta stone, etc.
This would be terabytes of data, and likely organized in a way to make it very intuitive to reverse engineer even by someone who has no idea how it works.
We could even case study this. Give a loaded one of these slates to some scientists who have no idea how the data on them is stored and have them try and decipher it.
If they can reasonably succeed quickly with no knowledge on how it works, then it should be easy for someone thousands of years from now too.
I've always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don't know because we are just completely different.
Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn't know it.