I was thinking about digital media and I got to wondering what would be a really good choice for permanent storage? Right now, we have Blue-Ray DVD's (at least some people do), which seem to be replacing regular DVD's, which replaced CD's and VHS tapes. I don't know, some video cameras may still be using some kind of tape. Hard disk drives have gotten so cheap that it might be worthwhile to just save all your "stuff" (that's a technical term) on a hard drive, and put the hard drive in a safe place, and just skip the whole writing-everything-on-removable-media business.
Problem with all of these computer type mechanisms is that you need a computer to retrieve the information and a display device of some sort in order to read and/or view it. You could keep a computer around so you can access your archives, but computers are machines and they break down. You could keep replacing your computers with new ones, as long as new ones are available, but then you are going to need to upgrade your storage media, because eventually whatever you are using today is going to be obsolete.
Cloud computing is one way to deal with this problem. Simply upload all your files to some on-line data storage facility and let them worry about all the obsolescence problems. There will be a fee, but not having to deal with equipment and media issues might make it worthwhile. This only works as long as the company that is providing this service is viable and adequately performs their required duties. If the company goes broke, or incompetence creeps in, your whole archive could vanish.
So far we are only talking about normal day-to-day operations. What happens if disaster strikes? If an asteroid falls on your house and smashes all your carefully recorded disks, that would be bad. If it also happens to smush you, well, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. How about if some natural disaster takes out the on-line data storage facility where you have all your files stored? I suspect some of them have thought of this, and have all your data stored at multiple locations. If one gets wiped out, that's okay, there is another copy somewhere else.
War could be worse than a natural disaster, as the enemy may specifically target data storage facilities. Good size bombs set off at multiple data storage sites would be disastrous for all the data. One idea that gets kicked around is the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) associated with nuclear weapons. The idea is that a nuclear bomb set off high in the atmosphere would generate an EMP powerful enough to destroy most integrated circuits and erase all magnetic storage media in the area below the explosion, even if the physical effects of the explosion produced no damage. We're not going to worry about that. As far as we are concerned a bomb is a bomb. It is theoretically possible for all data storage facilities to be destroyed simultaneously by an act of war. Not likely, but possible.
Some time ago my gang and I were talking about civilization, and how we didn't really know what happened before someone started writing it all down a few thousand years ago. The last great ice age was between 10 and 20 thousand years ago. People have been around for 50 or 100 thousand years. Archeologists keep finding evidence that suggests ancient civilizations were more advanced than we thought. Suppose there was an advanced civilization before the last great ice age. Would there be any evidence of it? The ice sheet would have pretty much scraped everything off the surface, and a good bit of the surface as well. If there was a previous civilization and they buried anything, it hasn't been found yet.
Now we are faced with global warming, which some people think might trigger a new ice age. What kind of archive could you construct that could survive such a calamity? What kind of archive could you construct that would be useful even if our entire infrastructure/civilization were destroyed? It would have to be portable, it would have to be durable, fireproof, flood proof and vermin proof. The oldest written records we have discovered are clay tablets and carved stone. Not exactly portable. Remember the library in Alexandria in Egypt? It burned.
I read something the other day that mentioned if you really wanted to get rid of a dead body, you should just leave it on the surface, not bury it. Left out in the open critters would make short work of it. In a year there would nothing left, except maybe the fillings from the teeth. Burying the body would preserve the bones. Of course, there are the hygiene and stench issues, but that is only a problem if anyone is living in the area. Anyway, all this makes me wonder if the tombs of the pharaohs are not a hold over from some previous civilizations attempt to archive their collected knowledge. Or maybe we are just not sophisticated enough to extract the knowledge that has been encoded there. Whatever.
There was a Science Fiction story I read a few years ago. It was one of a set of stories all based on the same framework: an earth-like planet settled by various groups, but then cut off from space for a long period of time. One group that had just arrived, and in fact were in their space-ships in orbit around this planet realized they were going to have abandon their space ships and move to the planets surface. One of the last things they did before leaving their ships was to print their archives.It amounted to thousands of pages (or maybe millions), but they were not going to be able to build any more computers for a long time to come, but they wanted to take whatever knowledge they could with them.
Knowledge only becomes useful when it is in someone's head. Recorded knowledge is all very well, if you have the means to access it the know-how to interpret it. Remember the Rosetta Stone? It had three languages on it, one of which was Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had been able to understand until this one stinking stone was discovered.
The only way to maintain an archive is to maintain some semblance of a civilization, and I am afraid the only way to do that is with religion. Religion seems to be only human endeavor that manages to outlast civilization.
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