From The Bookseller:
Imagine you had a message for the future that you wanted to preserve for 5,000 years. Something important that had to survive generations, wars and any number of environmental catastrophes. A message perhaps like: “There was mixed weather this Easter”. How would ensure that this message would last?
Floppy discs, CDs, tape are horribly obsolete already. Emailing it is unlikely to last more than a couple of years, not least because some companies automatically delete emails after 60 days. So that’s out. Maybe print it out onto paper? This might last a few decades depending on the chemicals in the printer and the quality of the paper – remember how faxes faded after minutes in the sun? Actually, the best way to preserve a message would be to revert to engraving into a hard material. Without a diamond-engraving factory, perhaps the best material would be stone. So after a bit of chiseling, the message is now etched deep in the hardest stone possible.
. . . .
Fast forward 5,000 years from now, and a passing Martian explorer trips on an exposed piece of stone, and finds the message. The alien deciphers it and scratches his head, thinking: “There must have been a nice temperate climate in Northern Chile populated by English speakers.” The message has been kept but the context renders it useless.
While 5,000 years is a supreme challenge, the rate at which digital technology is being superseded means that this problem exists well within a lifetime. Indeed I have recently been wondering how to keep working copies of the many interactive projects I have produced over the years: The laserdiscs that were in the Wellcome Trust lobby, the CDi interactive story, the floppy disc and CD-ROM Macromedia projects for Penguin. Even the Guardian website relaunches in the late nineties whose aesthetic impact is still felt today. As I look back on these projects, most of them are now offline with no record even on the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, and the CD-ROMs simply do not work, even if I could find a computer with a CD drive in the first place.
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
The opening line of this piece reminded me of the book I hadda read in HS titled ‘A Canticle For Leibowitz’.
Print copies for those you care about on acid free paper. Your work will last until thrown away by your descendants.
This has been a problem for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Atomic encrypting.
Durability is, for practical purposes, inversely proportional to data density.
We have perfectly readable baked clay tablets more than four thousand years old. None of my current computer media will likely be readable in twenty years.
We’re riding the technological tiger; there’s no way to maintain the storage pool without constant replacement. One big hitch and we’d lose almost everything.
“We have perfectly readable baked clay tablets more than four thousand years old.”
‘I’ can’t read them. 😉
(And weren’t they found in a cave where no one had bothered them for most of those 4000 years?)
And I agree about the ‘can’t read current stuff in twenty years’, I have some Playboy video CDs from back in the day (had video drivers for 95/98) that nothing today can read (they claim to be AVI files, but nothing today will touch them.)
Etch your story on a dense metal, coated in wax to slow wear/rust, sealed in a box and then hidden deep in a cave that you then collapse the entrance to hide it from those that would melt it down for the metal. (And then hope it’s later found by someone who thinks it might be ‘interesting’.)
Or put it on the internet and hope that it’s interesting enough that people exchange it and copy it as the tech/language changes. (We can still read Homer and listen to Bach.)
We have one particular large number of clay tablets that were baked when the repository burnt down. Clay tablets were not generally baked and the preservation of this cache is an accident. Archeologists get very excited about it because it is a collection of everyday records from one place and time, not what someone thought was worth preserving.
I don’t recommend trying the same method with either your printouts or your hard-drive.
The author spent their life on ephemeral products and now wants these snowflakes to last 5000 years?
I am disappoint.
So behind the times …
Haven’t they heard that if you put it on the internet you can never get rid of it?
Of course that means putting it out there in a easy to read/update format — and putting it out there for ‘free’ so there’s no problems with others copying it.
Hmmm, hope the guy/gal has one heck of an estate to leave to the future so they have the funds to translate it to whatever languages they’ll be using by then.
The sad little thing the OP doesn’t realize is that after expending whatever effort he or she does to accomplish this goal, his estate will probably just throw that box in the trash.
Teleread had a bit about this awhile back regarding book collections. There are some people who have worked hard at building large well-curated paper book collections and are suddenly dismayed to find out nobody wants them.
When I have customers 5,000 years in the future and a reasonable expectation of enjoying the profits from those sales, I will find a way. Until then . . . Happy Trails.