Is there any digital data storage hardware and associated encoding that has an intended archival life of at least 1000 years without electricity?
I know it's an old question, but given that paper or palm leaf manuscripts last that long, is there any standard out there which would support civilizational timescales?
No bonus points for guessing why I'm wondering about this.
Yep. Reading old scripts can be a challenge, though usually for materials < 2000 years old it's not too tricky. But encoding things depends on the affordances of the medium (sending electrical impulses down a wire is different to carving printing blocks) and if it has to be self-documenting then it's a huge challenge. Some sort of highly durable medium that is tightly packaged with a simple reader which offers miminal info on the underlying format, all of which can be forgotten for a millenium and recharge from solar panels or some such?
@hankg
I can't help seeing this as another casualty of the hyperindividualism that has plagued humanity for some centuries now. At the level of an individual this problem is all but invisible, but at the level of collective culture we have recreated ourselves with extrasomatic cognitive storage that is incredibly fragile and ephemeral. If I told you that you had the choice to remember much more for five years, but after that sink into senile dementia, would anyone want to choose the former?
The move from oral to written caused huge changes, and it still costs us something -- dyslexia, the loss of storytelling, and eventually the commodification of writing -- but this seem far more fraught given the guaranteed material instability of the next few centuries.
And of course I find myself wondering: whom does this amnesia serve? Does it render the majority of us more pliable to explotation?
Aaaaargh. I wish all webpages came with timestamps. Working out the "now" of breathlessly enthusiastic, but obviously out-of-date, pages for vanished NGOs is needless detective work.
I suppose I just want something like the byline on a newspaper article or the date field on a DNS record. I'm so used to researching in archives where journals, communiques, personal letters - heck, blogs - all have dates that I find it weird to see a webpage which is trapped in some self-important, obsolete now and I have to guess from context (does it mention "the challenges of lockdown"?). @simon_brooke 's suggestion is good...
Character idea: A scholar who is a book louse larvae— he is deeply torn between completing his research by reading the books and eating them so that he can pupate (and maybe then, at last have the nerve to ask out the moth on whom he has a terrible unrequited, totally secret crush)
Sometimes he eats books he finds poorly written out of spite.
having worked with very old South Asian codices, I can assure you that sometimes it does seem that the trajectory of the worm through the vertical stack of handwritten sheets has a certain editorial purpose...
Yes and no...
Oldest materials are palm leaf in the south, birch bark in the north (e.g. Gilgit mss). Palm leaf is then more widely used across South Asia, but paper made from Daphne bholua is increasingly used for the huge Newar manuscript collections after about 1300. And all of them get eaten by worms.
Not going down the rabbit hole, NOT going down the rabbit hole...
All three are plant fibre - lignin. Apparently the food source for many larvae that attack manuscripts of many kinds is fungi or other things that colonize the surface of writing materials - it's the storage environment that creates the conditions for these to grow. Beyond that I will not go, not just now.
I had a wonderfully civilized thank-you note after a research meeting yesterday. I'm still processing the notes, but how lovely to be told that it was an enjoyable conversation!
You can't. These are all social practices, from abstract concepts to fieldwork methods to the very idea (and experience) of being "an individual", and no one person can create them. You can foster, nourish, and grow them across your interactions with others.
I would follow Vyogotsky, Durkheim, and Bateson (and Nāgārjuna) in taking the social interaction as coming before any sense of an individual; and from e.g. Celia Busby we have good studies of societies where the person is partible, fluid, flowing across bodies and lineages. So, no, not ideas first. Emergent social practices.
Vincent Ialenti studied Finnish scientists modelling nuclear waste safety in the distant future. He describes how they learned to cultivate an imperfect awareness of deep time.
He is a cultural anthropologist, now working with Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation.
I cannot help wondering how diffetent this project would be if it had been undertaken by an African or South Asian woman, who knew that what they learned might become policy in Lagos or Dhaka. It is a soothing story Ialenti tells; at least in that extract, there is no corruption, no insurgency, no religious riots, no corporate capture of regulatory agencies. And the board of the Long Now foundation is the techbros of my generation: Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelley, Danny Hillis, Mitch Kapor.