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'm wondering if someone as done studies on the last technical revolution of this kind, aka the printing press. To which extent the printing press helped prevent the definitive loss of documents? There are probably a tons of factors to take into account, like history, age, kind of documents, etc, but it could be quite interesting.
Lastly, as a though experiment, I'm wondering how an archeologist would react in front of a disk drive in a thousand years. Let say the disk drive is in a good condition, but the archeologist has to discover everything:
1) First he has to understand that the disk contains binary data spread in a certain way, if he has equivalent technology or better than today, this should work. (if he realizes that he should be extremely cautious when opening the disk drive, at least for spinning rust).
2) Then he could have to understand the logical layout of data on the medium (aka the FS), this step is kind of optional has you can recover fragment easily, but it would help a lot. And if data was stored in a DB, it's a second layer equivalent to the FS.
3) Then you have to understand the file format, if it's directly a simple TXT file, it should be doable, and it's probable someone can deduce the encoding used, ASCII is easy, UTF-8 is a bit more complex but doable. But, and it's a big but, if the data is compressed in anyway, and a lot of formats are these days, I skeptical that the archeologist (and his technical assistance) would be able to deduce it's a compressed format and not some random garbage, and then re-discover the algorithm used. And if it's a more complex document, like images (even if BMP should be doable), sound and video, it starts to get really tricky.
4) And then, you need to decipher the language and/or alphabet used.
Basically it feels a lot like Champollion needing to decipher 4 layers of hieroglyphs before getting the content. Deciphering one can already be hard enough.
That being said, as source code is often recorded as simple ASCII files which should be decipherable, he could get lucky and get the code parsing the layers, or at least get a specification of it.
Not so, it seems:
Today, fossils are dug up and flown around the world to museums etc. We publish but if that storage doesn't last or is undecipherable, future civilizations might have an interesting adventure trying to reconstruct the world of 100's of millions of years before our time.
I wonder if there has been any consideration of this or attempts at placing long-lived simple markings to guide?
There's a project to design and place long-lived simple markings to tell people to stay away from nuclear waste storage sites, and... it's hard problem: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/17/talking-t...
Me too. But take care about the infamous answer to "Why is the sky blue?", which is quite confusing. The take of Randall Munroe is much clearer, and exactly as correct: "the sky is blue because air is blue".
I found Walter Lewin's explanation of Rayleigh scattering to be pretty clear.
This comes off as a smart-alecky non-answer to anyone not already familiar with what gives things colours in the first place. John Baez's answer captures the core mechanism in two sentences and one diagram, and provides more detail below for the curious:
> A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.
Ref: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1818:_Rayleigh_Sc...
Try to empathize with someone asking this type of question. Would you be satisfied with the type of answer you support? Would it trigger immediate follow-up questions that are basic rephrasings of your original question?
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/