421–430 of 825 posts
Honestly. Very few other things have concrete evidence that they physically last 500 years under real-world conditions, and specific technologies rarely seem to survive even 50 without such drastic changes that they're hardly equivalent any more. And large stones are so common that it's unlikely to be desirable to use it as a resource in the future.
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I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. They could get really unluckly and hit a star/planet, but it's not at all likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them…
> I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever again. Things we put into heliocentric orbits are likely to be forever , too. > Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last…
like trees falling silently in desolate forests?
Also, try 1000 year institutions like the Vatican or something.
Get it archived on Archive.org
If you’re worried about translation, then provide another translation of it in technical and Old Mandarin, ancient Arabic, high Latin, koine Greek, Sanskrit, Hausa (Nigerian), and Shakespearean/King James English.
There’s going to be Catholics, Orthodox, random Protestant Christians, Muslims, Confucians, and Hindus in 500 years (plus a lot of Nigerians), and there will be millions of people able to read and understand some of those ancient languages and committed to preserving them.
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I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.
There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin... I think it’s more reaso…
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There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won…
This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition. Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat i…
Yes, but that's different from an apocalyptic scenario. Predicting the population increase in the 60s was also scientific. Predicting that we couldn't feed several billion people turned out to be wrong. Increased sea level rise and more extreme weather is one thing, predicting that human civilization ends and we all die is an entirely different matter.
Apcoalytic scenarios make worst case assumptions. That we'll fight a nuclear war which will trigger a nuclear winter, or that population won't peak and there's no green revolution, or that feedback loops will lead to a hothouse Earth scenario. But the likely projections don't show that.
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The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.
“The thing is there can't be more than one phone system , ever. The moment someone invents a new phone system , someone will create a gateway to the old phone system , and the phone system will live on.” Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous “gateways” to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> f…
I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras.
Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too.
Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
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Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years. Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.…
I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal societies cultural values change, so no information can be preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may contain positive depictions of acts that are considered morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape, etc) or simply physic…
That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations.
So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes, people do some archeological digging and reconstruct portions of some documents or bring them to light and popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever fashions are happening in that society.
That does not mean that the society as a whole is preserving documents well, even though you will always have some ancient texts available, and people are still mining the junkyard.
Moreover once we move to information stored online in the present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to happen with modern technologies.
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Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could very well be replaced in the medium-term future
I thought Unicode was already replacing ASCII.
Inscribe the website into a tablet made from non reactive materials and again store in a controlled environment.
Launch a satellite into space in stable orbit and have them retrieve the pictures/tablet from the satellite in 500 years.