this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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There is no "write and forget" solution. There never has been.
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts? No, we have only those that have been copied over and over in the course of the centuries. Historians knows too well. And 90% of anything ever written by humans in all history has been lost, all that was written on more durable media than ours.
The future will hold only those memories of us that our descendants will take the time to copy over and over. Nothing that we will do today to preserve our media will last 1000 years in any case.
(Will we as a specie survive 1000 more years?)
Still, it our duty to preserve for the future as much as we can. If today's historians are any guide, the most important bits will be those less valuable today: the ones nobody will care to actually preserve.
Citing Alessandro Barbero, a top notch Italian current historian, he would kill no know what a common passant had for breakfast in the tenth century. We know nothing about that, while we know a tiny little more about kings.
There is: mdiscs. Allegedly 1000 years durability even in Blu-ray format. Should be good enough for most important things. The best tapes AFAIK 30- 100 years
Problem is how to read the disk, especially after generations. Will they retain the knowledge to build and operate a device for this?
That's always problem for any type of media. Including the tape which keep changing generations and only few recent are supported for reading. I still have blue ray reader / writer though
It's even the case for physical media, like paper and carved stone, because over a long enough time people forget the language that they were written in. Historians had to teach themselves how to read ancient egyptian, and off the top i think a lot of Maya inscriptions are still a mystery.
Simple, we wrrie down the information on how to read the discs!
I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of "Last Words (2020)".
Microfilms used to be sold as having a life expectancy of up 500 years. But in my experience they were a pain to use and the machines costly to maintain. The films would tear regularly too. Also the quality of the recorded image could be very poor sometimes.