Comment by jpc0

Thought experiments are a springboard for an area of thought, not necessarily a literal question to be answered. When someone asks you "what would you do with a billion dollars" responses like "but I don't have a billion dollars" or "nothing, I'd be investigating how I got it" completely miss the point. It's not about whether the scenario would realistically play out it's about setting the stage for certain types of thoughts without prescribing an exact question on everyone. Maybe you'll never realistically be at a train track with a fork in a road, 1 in the alternate path and 5 in the active path, with nothing more than the option to flick the switch and no other consideration to make... but it sets the stage for interesting thoughts to consider and talk about.

It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.

The only requirements for reading a physical book is that you know how to read and can turn pages.

If it's digital storage, you have to have electricity, a compatible device, an understanding of the storage, and software that can read it.

Information has outlived entire civilizations because of books. The key is the technology needed to decode and read it, which is just humans themselves. Either people still exist who can read and speak the language or closely related languages, and if not, we can hope to find something like a Rosetta stone or use statistical analysis that relies up on the commonality of all human languages.

Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.

We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.

No there is not. What do you mean!

Nothing has been verified to work beyond 50 years, and those with data errors and failure rates.

There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.

What technologies are you thinking of?

Ubiquitous access to reader devices is also a factor, and I can’t actually think of anything that fits that bill.

Yeah, and where exactly are those libraries? Are they in safe places that won't be obliterated if a war breaks out? I don't think so; they're mostly in the most likely to be targeted locations.

If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.