Re: [ARSCLIST] Long-term/preservation audio

[stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Noting that this post is discussing preservation for at least a 100-year
term,
we may have either of two problems to deal with! There are two plausible
scenarios for human civilization in 2103: either our technology will
continue
evolving at an exponential rate, meaning that current technology may well be
long forgotten (or, if we're lucky, preserved as interesting antiques, as we
do cylinder phonographs)...or one of our usual misadventures will have
resulted
in nuclear war, meaning that the survivors (if any) will be trying to
discover
how their ancestors created fire, Neither promises much of a future for
archiving information, although the first might beat the second assuming the
media can last the century!

Thus, we need either to migrate the archive each time an improvement is made
in information technology, or make sure that along with the media we
preserve
a means to read it, along with clear instructions on how it is to be used.
Obviously, time-related deterioration of both media and hardware have to
be considered as well. Finally, we will need space to put the archive...it
grows, by definition, and thus we may wind up choosing between space for
history and space for population. Further, we have to know where everything
is filed once we file it, so we can find it again if necessary!

I recall a science-fiction story I read decades ago, in which a civilization
had reached the point of colonizing planets just to use their satellites for
information storage! In the story, the civilization finally collapse when
someone inadvertantly cross-linked a reference, thus denying access to
the rest of the archive...
Steven C. Barr