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from the back-to-clay-tablets-are-we? dept.
Martin Kunze wants to gather a snapshot of all of human knowledge onto plates and bury it away in the world's oldest salt mine.
In Hallstatt, Austria, a picturesque village nestled into a lake-peppered region called Salzkammergut, Kunze has spent the past four years engraving images and text onto hand-sized clay squares. A ceramicist by trade, he believes the durability of the materials he plies gives them an as-yet unmatched ability to store information. Ceramic is impervious to water, chemicals, and radiation; it's emboldened by fire. Tablets of Sumerian cuneiform are still around today that date from earlier than 3000 B.C.E.
"The only thing that can threaten this kind of data carrier is a hammer," Kunze says.
[...] The goal of the project, which he calls the Memory of Mankind, is to build up a complete, unbiased picture of modern societies. The sheets will be stored along with the larger tablets in a vault 2 km inside Hallstatt's still-active salt mine. If all goes according to plan, the vault will naturally seal over the next few decades, ready for a curious future generation to open whenever it's deemed necessary.
To Kunze, this peculiar ambition is more than a courtesy to future generations. He believes the age of digital information has lulled people into a false sense that memories are forever preserved. If today's digital archives disappear—or, in Kunze's view, when they do—he wants to make sure there's a real, physical record to mark our era's place in history.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:04PM
> The goal of the project, which he calls the Memory of Mankind, is to build up a complete, unbiased picture of modern societies.
And how does he intend to do that? Considering so much of our history and memory is biased based on perceptions and historic context. Look at history, most of it is biased, or challenged, or (depend on which country/nation/group) completely different. Even modern history, events that happened a few months ago.
The only thing you could store in a completely unbiased way are maths and the sciences (and even there, you get disagreement, bias and arguments).
If the goal of this project is really for a "complete, unbiased picture", then it is dead before it even started. They will get stuck in a quagmire they will never get out of.
Alternatively, they can just provide "their opinion" on what is an unbiased picture, which in itself is biased and not representative of "mankind", thereby breaking one of the core points of the exercise in the first place.
Maybe they can store each and every variation on a theme/event/occurrence, but I think they will find that their storage requirements may double or triple, if not higher multiples of that. Plus it would get complex really quickly for anyone who later reads it, as they will have maybe 10 versions of an event, all different.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:18PM
my random thoughts.
Unbiased? A great deal of fluff surely. I'd be happy with finding published articles!!
Oh and from the recesses of my movie bank...
"Here we have the fifteen....*crash*...Ten commandments". (Mel Brooks)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:36PM
It was supposed to be one commandment: "Don't be a dick."
Moses just had to be a dick and demand ten bullet points.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:34PM
Alternatively, they can just provide "their opinion" on what is an unbiased picture, which in itself is biased and not representative of "mankind", thereby breaking one of the core points of the exercise in the first place.
While I agree that it's impossible for anyone to be completely without bias (and I modded you up for that insight), I think it's a bit reflective of our current events for people to fail to acknowledge the possibility of LESS bias. For example, everyone has different perspectives on the so-called "Golden Age of News" back in the mid-20th century. Was it free from bias? Of course not. Are there problems created by having just a few major networks determining what America knows about and shaping that discourse? Sure. Was it an anomaly in news throughout history (which has basically had streaks of "yellow journalism" since it began with the dawn of the printing press)? Yes -- sensationalistic, biased news has been typical for news in most ages.
BUT... with all that, I think it's still possible to acknowledge that the news producers of that era tried a bit to remove obvious bias and tried a bit not to insert intentional bias most of the time.
So, it may not be possible for an archive to exist without any bias about history or human knowledge. But I don't think that makes the project flawed from the start. It may be idealistic, but it is possible to at least TRY to represent things without overt bias, and when different incongruous understandings are popular, to try to represent a pluralistic perspective.
Plus it would get complex really quickly for anyone who later reads it, as they will have maybe 10 versions of an event, all different.
Welcome to the world of historiography. Historians deal with this problem all the time. Perhaps one significant problem with most people's understanding of history is that we don't often acknowledge how much has to be reconstructed and how hard it is.