Historical data hoarders at the library of Alexandria lost untolds amount of work and knowledge after the library was burned. Sumerian texts survived 4000+ years due to being written on clay tablets. Is there any efforts to transcribe some of our knowledge into more permanent media?

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Far_Marsupial6303 · 2024-06-11T16:35:19+00:00

Voyager 1 & 2 have analog golden records and there are are many duplicates on Earth.

SupermarketFit9015 · 2024-06-11T16:30:28+00:00

Yup. Ceramic Tablets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_of_Mankind Also, in a bit more modern way: https://nanofiche.com/

stilljustacatinacage · 2024-06-11T18:18:26+00:00

Also, most of the information at the Library of Alexandria is believed to have survived, as a lot of what was kept there were copies of documents kept elsewhere. Similarly, original works stored at the Library usually had copies somewhere else as well.

There's really no way to know exactly how much was lost, but the general consensus these days is that it wasn't as great as a catastrophe as we've been led to believe.

jbtronics · 2024-06-11T19:24:57+00:00

A big problem is that to save large amounts of data requires high data densities. Sure stone tablets are very durable, but just for putting Wikipedia on stone tablets (in a readable), you will probably need unimaginable large spaces to store all of them. And Wikipedia is just a fraction of human knowledge.

Therefore you need higher data densities, which automatically needs that the information needs to become somehow smaller. And you easily reach a point where you need very advanced technology to retrieve the data. Stuff like synthetic DNA in glass or laser engraved glass cubes are pretty durable, but without computers, micro technology and advanced machinery, it's just pretty useless.

Things like micro film are quite nice, as you just need pretty easy optics to read them (and you can at least recognize by eye, that these might be data storage devices). But the data density is also quite limited.

fliberdygibits · 2024-06-11T17:05:54+00:00

Github just recently added a HUGE repository of open source software to the Arctic World Archive:

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

There are other such efforts for saving data. Oreo for example has their own vault.

Edit - I said "recently".... but it was 4 years ago. Time has been wonky the last few years:)

Halen_ · 2024-06-11T20:25:55+00:00

Project Silica

https://unlocked.microsoft.com/sealed-in-glass/

YanniRotten · 2024-06-11T20:36:40+00:00

The Crypt of Civilization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_of_Civilization

https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/

drashna · 2024-06-12T00:38:30+00:00

Pretty sure it wasn't actually the burning that was the issue, but the decline of intellectualism and education, and that let the library decay until ....

The problem isn't the actual preservation, but the culture around it, basically.

Halos-117 · 2024-06-11T17:19:32+00:00

Nothing is permanent.

Several_Fan9272 · 2024-06-11T18:09:32+00:00

I convert old offline books into digital variants and have multiple backups because I put a lot of time and energy into it. Besides an upload to internet archive for sure.

If fallout comes, we all have more problems than unreadable media. Besides the fact that there are a lot of media stored safty in a mountain.

Ceramic can break easy, plastic can melt easy. Stone is good imho.

Steuben_tw · 2024-06-11T17:44:04+00:00

I'm not going to say the mantra... but the mantra. <insert pic of ancient aliens guy with the hair>

The media itself while of consideration, is a minor factor. Assuming the physical media has suitable internal redundancy, localized failure can be functionally ignored. Mechanisms and proof of such is left as an exercise for the reader.

Raw physical accessibility follows from the mantra. The mechanisms for such application is left as an exercise for the reader.

This leaves what is the most important question. How to encode it such that it is
- allow for bootstrap translation, from the starting assumption of the reader knows there is knowledge written there. But has no other context about it. Example, Rosetta stone. While not created as such it contained enough information to allow the translation of the remaining text on the stone, and boot strap the translation of other documents in that language.
- encoded with information, or series of formats, that allows for recreation of decoding techniques/devices of higher complexity information. Example, text information on how to reconstruct a record player to retrieve stored audio information.
- marked such that it can be easily indicated that there is knowledge here. Example, the message in "Contact", by Carl Sagan. Think of it as the inverse problem that Sandia National Laboratories faced.

lunatisenpai · 2024-06-11T17:20:18+00:00

m disc is another way.

Very long term digital storage for archives. Sadly the main company with the patent is selling normal blu rays with the same name, that degrade in like, five years, hoping the tech becomes more widespread now that the patent expired.

ushred · 2024-06-11T21:56:21+00:00

Whenever I hit the lotto, I plan on printing all my pdfs to microfilm and burying with me in my mausoleum. My magnum opus.

FFM · 2024-06-11T22:45:21+00:00

This popped up on my RSS feeds yesterday

"World's Largest Online Corpus of Translated Cuneiform Texts" https://aicuneiform.com/

DoaJC_Blogger · 2024-06-12T00:19:19+00:00

Group 47's DOTS optical tapes are supposed to be able to last hundreds to thousands of years without climate control.

Catsrules · 2024-06-12T00:56:44+00:00

How about a clay tablet QR code that will link them to Wikipedia? :)

Realistically I am less about making something that last 1,000 years and more about making copies of it. End of the day nothing is permanent, but if you can replicate it easily you can get very close to being permanent.

The printing press was a game changer. We are no longer dealing with single copies of things or spending hundreds of man hours making hand written copies of information. We have now scaled up to thousands if not tens of thousands of copies via the printing press

Now that we have hit the digital age making copies is super easy and will be a perfect copy to the original and you can switch seamlessly between media. Your 10TB library of books, you can backup for $100 and 5 minutes of your time. That is something that was unheard of no too long ago. In 10 years when we have whatever the new storage is you can copy your books again to the new media and so on.

Now sure digital data does require a lot of overhead to read. And I could see world destruction scenario where we don't have any more technology to read the digital data. That 10TB drive is useless if you don't have access to a computer that can read it. But we have so much technology laying around, I think survivors could figure out how to reverse engineer the technology fairly easily.

horse-boy1 · 2024-06-12T01:44:12+00:00

Ceramics-based storage medium consumes very little energy and lasts more than 5,000 years, creators say

https://www.techradar.com/pro/video-of-ceramic-storage-system-prototype-surfaces-online-10000tb-cartridges-bombarded-with-laser-rays-could-become-mainstream-by-2030-making-slow-hard-drives-and-tapes-obsolete

PiedDansLePlat · 2024-06-12T03:42:25+00:00

Things that makes me sad : burning down of alexandria library many times, smashing of artefacts by talibans in museums, destruction of the afghan massive buddhas, ongoing destruction of Armenians heritage monuments while no ones care at all, millenium old buildings getting taken down…

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