
Will You Be Able to Read This Article in 1,000 Years? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/will-you-be-able-to-read-this-article-in-1000-years
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yellowapple
"Will You Be Able to Read This Article in 1,000 Years?"

Barring some significant advancement in Sid-Meier's-Alpha-Centauri-style
technologies like longevity vaccines or brain uploading, probably not.

Even if I do survive, will I still be speaking this dialect of English? Will I
even be speaking English at all?

But back to the main point of the article, saving the article as a PDF is a
_very_ wrong approach; binary formats are likely going to be the first to die
off. I'd be much more confident in the article being stored more-or-less as it
is now: as plain-text markup, style information, and some code executable by
just about any modern Javascript implementation, accompanied by the texts of
the relevant standards (for HTML, CSS, ECMAScript/Javascript, etc.), so that
any individual could then (theoretically) piece everything together and
display it as it was intended to be displayed.

Lots of very old software from the beginning of computing history has been
preservable in source code form for this very reason of the robustness of
plaintext; even with encoding differences, it's been possible to convert these
documents (even if doing so has been a manual process). I'd expect that, due
to this robustness of plaintext, free-and-open-source software has significant
preservation advantages relative to proprietary software (of the closed-source
variety, at least), since there's a greater chance of copies surviving due to
how widespread said copies are.

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basseq
Flip this around and look backwards: how much exists from 1000BC–1000AD (using
the "1,000 years to 3,000 years" figure cited by Cerf)? In popular knowledge,
not much: Sun Tzu and Confucius, the Bible, the Kama Sutra, Homer, Virgil,
Beowulf, Aristotle, Plato, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Machiavelli, Chaucer, and
their peers around the time of Gutenberg are all "too late" in the 14th
century.

These works survived because they were (presumably) important. Cultural
understanding is important to anthropologists and shows up as well (e.g.,
graffiti at Pompeii). But how much is Crash Bandicoot going to _matter_ in
3000AD? How wide will the cultural divide be? (What's a "computer"? What's a
"button"?) What language will they speak?

Thus, the concern to me is less _how_ we'll save everything, but more _what_
are the important things to save? After all, the Iliad doesn't stand out among
zetabytes of video games, cat pictures, and Kardashian re-runs.

Interesting aside: the Department of Energy is facing a similar, simpler
challenge with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Namely, how do you
create signage that will work (survive, be understandable) for 10,000 years?
([http://www.salon.com/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain/](http://www.salon.com/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain/))

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iwwr
Well, it's also about the durability of the information medium. Clay tablets
have survived remarkably well and they give us a better view into ancient
Mesopotamia (particularly the ancient Ur-III dinasty) than later centuries'
records kept as papyrus or strips of wood.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Dynasty_of_Ur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Dynasty_of_Ur)

~~~
basseq
Very true. And the medium (among other factors, like literacy) has a self-
selecting component: you're not going to take the time (money, etc.) to make
clay tablets out of everything. There wasn't a clay-tablet-Twitter back in the
Neo-Sumerian Empire.

As modern medium becomes a) cheap, b) ubiquitous, and c) durable, there's no
reason to "edit" ourselves. Maybe that's a good thing: it would give future
anthropologists a treasure trove of information. But again, my concern is that
we'll end up with so much _quantity_ that the _quality_
data/recordings/thinking get subsumed, and future humans think we worship
cats. (All those photos! And captions! And videos! I for one bow to our feline
overlords.)

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dflock
The only reason we have anything from 1000yrs ago is because people
deliberately conserved it - copying, translating and actively passing things
down the generations - for example:

Media:

Oral history/stories -> early written versions on tablets/papyrus ->
vellum/scrolls/hand copied books -> printed books -> digital.

Language:

Aramaic/Ancient Greek -> Latin/Greek -> Modern English

If the original source media is very long-lived, you can skip some steps, but
you still need to actively conserve and translate things - not just between
old human languages, but from old media to new.

This process is obviously very lossy - we have only a tiny fraction of the
literature from 1000 yrs ago - we have only the intersection of the stuff that
people cared enough about to transcribe many times over and the transcribed
pieces that physically survived the ravages of time and history.

Expecting things to just survive over the long term without anyone doing this
- without anyone caring enough to do this - is probably both idealistic and
unrealistic.

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palmer_eldritch
No, I don't think I'll be able to read anything in 1000 years, not given my
life expectancy.

More seriously, on one hand, we have pretty good redundancy, since it's so
easy to copy things.

On the other hand, the durability of the mediums we use to store information
is probably not as good as writing stuff in stone or even on paper since in
the worst case scenario, depending on the format used, minor corruption can
make the data completely worthless.

Add to that the fact that future archaeologists will have to reverse-engineer
the whole stack from hardware to software if they want to have a chance to
make something of the (probably corrupt) data they have on hand. It probably
puts the bar even higher than understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Oh, and also add to that the signal vs. noise ratio of the data we produce
today and the amount of data we produce. It would probably be interesting to
see what picture future historians paint of our times with what they have on
hand.

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castratikron
People have been talking about this problem for decades. The only information
from this era likely to survive is what's stored in plain text or other easy
to interpret format. Do you really think people 500 years from now will be
able to watch the Blu-ray of Paul Blart Mall Cop 2? It's more likely that
they'll be able to create a C compiler and build some of the free software of
today.

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davidgerard
One of the explicit goals of the Document Foundation is to be able to answer
this question "yes". LibreOffice already does better on ancient Word documents
than Word 2013, and the Document Liberation Project is _all about_ the old
formats.

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blacksmith_tb
Hmm, taken literally, this is a perfect example of Betteridge's Law, as I
won't be around in 1,000 years to read anything. Rather than just the usual
discussion of bit rot, I personally would wonder if humans will still exist in
1,000 years, and if we do, if we will still read.

