Comment by nonameiguess

Comment by nonameiguess 10 days ago

3 replies

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.

Asraelite 9 days ago

I think looking at history is a terrible way to make predictions about the future. The world will never again be anything close to what it was in the past.

  • shiroiushi 9 days ago

    You think assuming humans in the future won't have eyeballs capable of viewing visible light is a bad assumption?

    If the humans of the future are all blind, I think we can forget about worrying about preserving civilization.