Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
While 10K is a few orders of magnitude greater than 500, I imagine the problems may be similar... if not more extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but arguably it should.
Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever again.
Things we put into heliocentric orbits are likely to be forever, too.
> Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.
While they won't decay from drag in a few million years, tidal forces and photon pressure become significant over time.
like trees falling silently in desolate forests?
Trying to grasp a time span of one million years feels impossible, in the context of development of culture and technology.
It seems quite unlikely to me that we are the first such development on this rock.
"You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"
Strength is usually defined by the application and usually focuses on tensile / compressive strength. This is also why rebar is used in concrete, concrete has excellent compressive strength, but poor tensile strength.
There's lots of metrics for strength, also resistance to fatigue is often an important metric.
Diamond has excellent hardness, and compressive strength (diamond anvils), it's very poor in most other metrics of strength and evaporates above 450 degrees, so it's not good for anything hot.
I remember, now, but it wouldn’t be a spoiler for me.
There were also a lot of odd assumptions/conclusions about how people would behave but I put that down to a different cultural mindset (and in this sense it was pretty interesting), however some of the recurring social themes stretched credibility a bit. Also for a book that's generally held up as being hard sci-fi, the actual science aspect had some glaring flaws in pivotal events which really strained belief. (Well, either that or my understanding of astrophysics is way off...)
For example, book archivists recommend against storing books in waterproof containers. https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefo... "Be careful storing books in plastic containers. Because plastic containers form an air tight seal, any moisture residing inside your books will be trapped. If your books are not completely dry before placing them inside a plastic container for book storage, they may develop mold or mildew. If using plastic containers, make sure to insert silica gel packets to absorb moisture."
Instead, archivists recommend acid-free archival boxes. (Gaylord is a recommended brand.)
The other point is that you shouldn't just have one copy printed. Like any important data, you'll want to have backups.
At a minimum, if you have multiple children, giving one copy to each child is sensible; it would make sense for each person to have at least two copies, one to keep at home, and another to keep somewhere else that would hopefully remain safe.
If your document is suitable for public consumption, you could pay for a vanity press to make it available for publication, arranging to have copies stored in libraries. As of today, arranging to have your book archived in the Library of Congress is a reasonable approach to ensuring that some professional archivist will at least try to take care of your book.
(They'll also attempt to digitize your book, and archivists will attempt to care for the digital collection, but, as you noted, there's no way to be sure that any digital equipment will be working 500 years from now.)
But, if your thing is suitable for public consumption, consider another problem: will your great-grandchildren care to read what you wrote? Probably the only way to ensure that anyone will care to read your work is to be/become famous, and to write a successful work with millions of copies. (This also incidentally solves the archival problem: people care about protecting and preserving historically important documents.)
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr....
Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then the 2.5" SSD drives, and now the M.2 SSD drives... there's clearly no hope of any digital medium lasting 500 years. It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years ago!
Because you don't have the hardware lying around right now. It's still quite possible to read all popular formats today and most of the ones you mentioned can even connect to the same SATA bus available on basically all normal mainboards. And those are mediums which are built for ~10 years (you'll find bit rot by then, which is what is actually preventing you from reading the data). Tapes, for example, are meant for long-term storage, are still in use and can be readily read.
To add to this, books have the same problem. Have a look at the declaration of independence: The font and language is already quite different from what we use today, and that's only from ~250 years ago. Plus the paper would probably not hold up to normal handling anymore.
Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.
But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.
In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.
The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations.
It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.
So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement.
So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.
That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book to that sort of standard.
Ignoring the tone of the parent comment, i don't believe that this subcomment is necessarily correct either.
Sure, "cancelling" is a modern term, but i'm pretty sure that exile to any degree and censorship of the exiled people (or worse) have been prevalent throughout the history of humanity, be it reporting them to the communist spies for non-communist rhetoric, claiming that they're guilty of blasphemy against the church or declaring them a witch.
Thus, regardless of where any of us stand in regards to the political or ideological climate, viewing preserving information for a long time as a social problem definitely has some merit to it. For example, just look at this from almost a century ago: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1...
I think it might be the other way around: pigment-based inks are opaque particles bonded to the paper, and so even if their colour changes/fades they're likely to still be legible. Whereas dye-based inks, when they fade, can completely disappear. (One advantage of dye-based inks is that they have a larger gamut.)
That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations.
So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes, people do some archeological digging and reconstruct portions of some documents or bring them to light and popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever fashions are happening in that society.
That does not mean that the society as a whole is preserving documents well, even though you will always have some ancient texts available, and people are still mining the junkyard.
Moreover once we move to information stored online in the present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to happen with modern technologies.
>Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible
Which is clearly not true.
In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies are statistically better at preserving works in general" this is also demonstrably not true in the wide statistical sense. They are just as likely (if not more) to deliberately discard works that disagree with the general ethos of that society. Heresy is not really a big deal in a liberal society, but it will get some books burned and practitioners slaughtered (reducing social transmission of ideas) in a autocratic theocracy, for example.
Huh? Pounding your fists on the table is not, you know, an argument. That not everything is deleted after 50 years is not proof that something can last permanently.
> In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies
That's a complete misunderstanding of the post, which contrasts traditional societies with liberal societies, by changing the subject to authoritarian societies. As if this was the only choice.
Authoritarian societies are not the opposite of liberal societies. In fact authoritarian societies -- e.g. communist and nazi societies or other societies in which individuals are micromanaged -- only came into existence in the 20th Century when the technology for mass micromanagement became possible. And whatever words you use to descibe authoritarian societies, "preserving tradition" is not one of them. These are big book burning, history-rewriting societies because they try to address the issue of social reproduction by the fist of centralized top-down control that monitors and micro-manages every aspect of life. Human beings are not compatible with that type of control, which is why authoritarian societies don't last very long -- the Russian czars lasted a thousand years whereas communism lasted only 70. And people were much more free under the czars than under communism, because the czars never tried to control every aspect of social life, and never needed to setup networks of gulags, or a vast secret police force, or party functionaries throwing people in prison for skipping work without a doctor's note.
There is the old saying "the right talks about authority, the left talks about control". For a society to be able to preserve knowledge, it must develop long lasting institutions and a culture that reveres the past and seeks to preserve it. Therefore while you need a cultural respect for authority, you cannot actually have a centralized system of social control. So you need basics like "honor your father and your mother" to be taught in churches and other civil institutions, but you cannot have a world in which political meetings decide which author is going to be erased from history today or whether so-and-so is allowed to attend university because their parents were class enemies.
"And there seems to be text scrolling and blinking upon the display surface... never.... gonna... give you up? What do you think it means, Tharl?"
Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.
I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.
Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
So as people become disconnected from the great chain of being that connects your ancestors to you and you to your descendants, they start to build ugly, disposable buildings.
Perhaps one approach might be to provide lower interest rates to buildings based on the expected life and maintenance cost. So a building that is expected to last 500 years would have a much lower annual interest burden than a building expected to last 70 years. That would require some type of government guarantee for the 500 year bond.
Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone cares to build long-lasting structures..
I am assuming you are thinking of 2000, though, and only mistyped 2020 because... well, that one was weird, but only a year ago.
Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.
Yes, but that's different from an apocalyptic scenario. Predicting the population increase in the 60s was also scientific. Predicting that we couldn't feed several billion people turned out to be wrong. Increased sea level rise and more extreme weather is one thing, predicting that human civilization ends and we all die is an entirely different matter.
Apcoalytic scenarios make worst case assumptions. That we'll fight a nuclear war which will trigger a nuclear winter, or that population won't peak and there's no green revolution, or that feedback loops will lead to a hothouse Earth scenario. But the likely projections don't show that.
The actual concern is 2 degrees of average heat change and how that will change the web of systems that we rely on for current human civilization. Break enough subsystems in there and the human experience becomes dramatically different.
Unfortunately, all the existential risks from the Cold War are still around, plus we have new ones we didn't know about or didn't take seriously back then.
Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time like the start of a war would be, it's a process.
Such a shame!
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours - President Jimmy Carter
Barring that, I'm guessing the equivalent of stone tablets, or the golden record are the best bet. I wouldn't place any bets on anything that requires magnetism or electricity to survive in open space for long enough to matter. Like, platter bit-flips due to radiation from outer space are a thing, and current leakage would eventually render something like SSDs unreadable.
So hard copy for earth, radio and hard copy for the universe?
M-x purify-water is gonna save a lot of people one day.
somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
> In the longer term, archivists are encouraged to pool the resources of the encyclopedia for the common good. A suggested model of collaboration is based on the Leibowitz-Canticle report of the 1960s, which suggests pooling of archives in a centralized location, which might serve as a hub for reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag...
After reading that I quickly found a copy in the library to enjoy. Not many sci-fi books from 1959 have remained as relevant and fresh 6 decades later.
The other idea might be to encode your website in a song that's popular today but complex enough to be worthy of study by future generations.
I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of the data will survive.
But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies will be incentivized to continue hosting the data, as it's excellent PR if nothing else. They don't need to continue gathering the data, just host it.
Hosting is only going to become cheaper as t -> infinity, and given the massive amount of compute I've seen Google wield, it's hard to imagine that an operation like archive.org can't find some way to be preserved.
All that said, the biggest threat is sudden data loss. This only works as long as the data doesn't get lost. Has archive.org posted their operations policies anywhere? It would be interesting reading.
Imagine a future gdpr-like policy that gives people's descendants ownership and copyright over everything they've said. Suddenly every word written into archive.org has an owner, who might come and sue archive.org or its managers. Soon every person alive has some grandparent who wrote something in the archive and some of them are wanting compensation for all the decades archive.org has been distributing grandpa's words for free.
Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models, I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data. Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to think they won't last for a long time.
I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.
At nuclear waste sites, even the feds have come up with a few ways of saying "Don't enter. It is bad" with different languages, pictorial signs, and such.
It is really tough to figure out what the next few hundred years looks like. And to be a bit political, I don't think anyone saw the invasion of the capitol building in January.
It isn't easy to predict the future. With the original poster in mind, I think the best bet would to be with archive.org.
Maybe archive.org should provide this service. It could be a way to generate revenue - say "here is a thousand bucks, keep it for eternity."
I'm not sure I would want my thoughts to last that long though.
(And I'm still not sure that it would survive for more than a few hundred years.) Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington).
Rarely do the people that seek this actually achieve this. --quoth the raven
Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable. Vellum lasts forever
But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.
Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens.
On how to operate it, it's an e-reader, you turn it on there's the manual there. There is the really difficult part of telling people "put 12V DC here, ground on the outside", but it's trivial compared to the problem of people understanding the books inside.
A diode bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge) can easily take care of polarity inversions. Voltage is a harder problem.
Since we're going through flights of fancy in these threads, another option would be to add a built-in solar panel to your hypothetical e-reader. Expose it to enough light (and you can probably assume the lighting won't be much brighter than a tropical midday sun) and it turns on.
It should still be possible to make a solar powered e-reader long-lived, but a replaceable power supply is a good idea even if your device has to last for a couple of years.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
[1] : https://purl.pt/24107/1/iPres2013_PDF/Permanent%20Digital%20...
Same way they know now. Humans will still be humans. If my 3 year old son can figure out how my e-reader works from nothing, so can future humans.
Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.
I thought about either standard sized paper tape, or six foot wide reels of mylar (in any length) which can be punched at a pretty high bit density, and read back optically.
With instructions printed on the outside (and on the first dozen layers), much like the voyager record, explaining how to play it back, and construct a playback device, and how the encoding works.
on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.
I'm not sure if archived sites will cost less than 10MB by images and unlimitied private photo streams. Because we created the Internet to look forward, not backward.
Looks like 1+ TB for the minimal common case for the human race
I lost a lot of email.
They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.
If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.