Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books
by oblio on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @04:29AM
(#33620686)
I would argue that we shouldn't care about something in the extremely distant future, and what would be the second worst case scenario (the worst one being human extinction).
There's no way to really plan for it (prepping is a joke) and it slows down progress if we really do it.
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books
by BlueTemplar on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:10AM
(#33622362)
Yeah, I'm a bit worried about UTF-8 : it might be impractical to read with 8-bit only CPUs ?
At least the ASCII part should still be easily readable ? But not much of a relief for non-latin alphabet languages...
I very strongly disagree. The amount of technical overhead required to render a simple zipped XML from some storage medium is immense. Even if you store this on tape, you need a tape machine to read the bits. If you manage to pull this off, you won't get anything useful, because the XML is zipped. Decyphering a ZIP and translating it into bits which only make sense if you know that they represent binary numbers and must be read according to an obscure translation table (UTF-8) which is stored also digitally, someplace else, is more difficult than deciphering the enigma code, the hyroglyphs, and the Inca knot language combined. And even if you manage to pull off this unbelievable feat, you still require a parser, a renderer, a display or a printer to even get close to the possibility for a human to read it. For all of that, you not only need electricity, but the devices required are usually easily broken, and manufacturing them requires knowledge and a technical overhead (and also an amount of electricity) orders of magnitude larger than simply using them. Not to mention all the raw materials required to produce a display, a CPU, etc, which may simply be unavailable to future generations.
Now imagine humankind after a complete societal collapse. Tribe A finds, in some basement that survived the apocalypse, a collection of basic medical books. Tribe B finds, in another basement, a hard disk containing the entire Wikipedia, as a zipped XML file. Which culture is more likely to survive?