

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert  - lexx12
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-army-remains-sahara.html

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moron4hire
Can you imagine someone 2 millennia from now finding Amelia Earhart? Will they
even know who she was? Will they be able to figure out the purpose of the
machinery around her, or will they be so far removed from the age of
mechanical, piloted flight that they will have no context to understand what
it is? Will there be enough left to determine that it _was_ an airplane? Will
they even believe we had the power of flight, before we ever had computers,
scoffing, "how could they have flown? Such primitive people could never have
managed all of the equations necessary for flight in their heads in real
time."

~~~
ErrantX
It's an interesting thought; though I suspect record keeping is good enough
now not to lose track as much in the next 2 thousand years as we did in the
last 2 :)

~~~
moron4hire
That's assuming our records survive. I'm not entirely sure they will,
especially with the push to digitize records. The great thing about analog
storage, especially text on paper, is that it is at least partially
recoverable after being damaged. A library full of books that have been
sitting at the bottom of a newly formed sea for 1000 years has at least a
little information in it that can be saved. A stack of foil-backed disks,
magnetic tape, or magnetic disks that have done the same? Is the information
density too high for there to be enough error correction?

Also consider, will future generations even be able to figure out how to read
our digital formats? What if 1000 years from now, data is stored in a
completely different way than we have currently ever imagined, and has been
stored that way for so long that nobody remembers digital storage? Will a
future person look at a DVD and know they need to bounce a laser beam off of
it to be able to read it? Will they know that it has tracks of pitting
patterns that need to be transliterated into bit patterns that then need to be
decoded into semantic data? Will they know that CDs are different from DVDs
are different from Bluray? At least with text-on-paper, you can immediately
see with the bare eyes that something is there, and the only task left is the
decoding to semantic data.

Even if we can make sure we are storing our data properly, we store so much
more data now, will they be able to find anything of interest within the
deluge? I get so many emails in a single day that I can't find important
emails from as little as 3 days ago, I absolutely depend on search in order to
get to them. Not only that, but how will future people differentiate between
the important historical data--who did what and when--from the mundane logging
information?

