11–20 of 205 posts
On this topic - Oswald Spenglers observations on the topic of civilizational collapse are an interesting read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West > Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.
Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage.
On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics questions: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/
I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations collapses.
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
For that to happen our current civilization would have to be defined as every civilization on Earth.
On this topic - Oswald Spenglers observations on the topic of civilizational collapse are an interesting read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West > Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.
Now the superorganism is global. Who will be left to carry the torch?
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…
Not so, it seems:
This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…
There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.
I see little point in trying to solve this issue.
But while we are here - we can make copies of useful knowledge and try to have them as in tact as possible...
On this topic - Oswald Spenglers observations on the topic of civilizational collapse are an interesting read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West > Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.
A superorganism, yes, with a limited lifespan, yes, if you stretch it until the extinction of humans, but a "predictable" lifespan, that's laughable at best: the more information is transformed into data, the longer a culture will last, and the less predictable its lifetime will be.