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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: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:04PM
Fear of loss never gets old.
While this is true, I do think there is at least some record issues that have already come up with some historians I know personally who work on recent topics. For historians of centuries ago, there is always a paucity of information. They struggle to find out what they can from ANY document that survives. Sometimes just a random inventory list that was made by an unknown person for some unknown reason is a clue to an essential historical find... because most things were lost or repurposed or whatever.
Not so for historians who work with the 20th century. Obviously things were lost there too, but SO MUCH was kept. So many documents typewritten and filed. So many letters put in folders in desks and cabinets. Historians who work on medieval stuff or even stuff from a couple hundred years ago tend to joke about "how easy" it is for modern historians. Want to know something about some famous person? Go to a library where they donated their "papers" and you'll often find a room full of documents with more detail than a medievalist could ever dream of about even the most famous people in Europe centuries ago.
BUT -- all of that changed in the past 25 years or so. There is a "digital dark age" of records that happened during the transition. Instead of filing paper copies, people just had MS Word documents on a computer, which then failed or was tossed the trash. Or they were kept on floppy disks that decayed. Or whatever. I have been an officer of a group founded in 1991, and we have basically no extant records from the first 10 years of the organization. Nobody even remembers who all the officers were. Yes, it isn't a large group, but with no effort to pass things along electronically and put them in a centralized "archive," things were simply lost.
I know a historian who is working on a project on a major figure who died in the past couple decades. They are encountering the same issue -- yes, there are "papers" of all kinds from decades ago, even written drafts of documents preserved, so you can trace the detailed evolution of the person's thought. But then basically everything stops around 1985 when this person got a computer. There are some occasionally written records, and some stuff toward the end was preserved, but for all of the current concern that "Everything you post on Facebook could live with you forever," there are also millions of records lost irretrievably every day.
I'm not necessarily saying that all of this should be preserved. There's a lot of unimportant ephemera. But we're as a culture are NOT being consistent about electronic preservation. Stuff sticks around in old formats that can no longer be read and on media that will decay. Librarians and archivists are working on solutions to this, but it's interesting how digital data is likely going to result in a sort of "dark age" in certain types of documented history beginning sometime in the 1980s until we sort it all out.
What strikes me is how pitifully short civilizations have been.
Just a random thought, but what always blows my mind is the concept of ancient archaeologists. And yes, there were some. I remember reading an account of some ruler close to the fall of the Assyrian Empire (ca. 600 BCE) who was interested in "antiquities" and had some giant stone monument dug up, transported, and displayed in his city -- this was a monument originally erected ca. 3000 BCE. That is, this ruler in the ancient Near East was looking at a lost piece of a civilization that was as long ago for him as he is to us. Time often seems to "compress" as we think backwards in history, because we tend to know less and less about it. But even within recorded human civilization, time can seem quite vast when you think about.
But obviously you're right that this means little in terms of the vastness of space and the time it would likely take to travel it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 19 2017, @09:06PM
I find digital media a Godsend. A whole wall of books can fit on one SD card, and computers can search through that material for whatever I want far, far faster than I can. The only reason I keep various paper items is fear of copyright extremism. I'd dump my old print magazine collections in a heartbeat if I could be sure they'd always be freely available online. Nevertheless, I've been dumping them. Just put a batch of early 1980s Scientific Americans in the recycling bin last night, and the 1970s are next. I tried to sell them online, only to confirm what I'd been hearing from everyone on that subject. Old magazines aren't worth spit. Costs far more in shipping to deliver them than they're worth.
Sadly, our public libraries have not been allowed to take full advantage of digitization. If I want to look at old magazine issues, I ought to be able to just browse to a library website and call them up. I shouldn't have to keep a private collection. Takes lots of room I really do not have. And that's what the library is for! I can do that for really old items, and it's fantastic. Found scans of the papers of Euler (a famous 18th century mathematician) online, all conveniently organized with a numbering system. There's more. Euler wrote his papers in Latin, and I feared I'd have to see what Google's translate could do with them. But modern scholars have put together excellent English translations of everything and made the translations freely available as well.
The digital dark ages would be less dark if copyright law had been radically reformed decades ago. Frequent format changes have played their part, but I suspect copyright law's part is bigger than appreciated. In the process of building his library, it would be great if Mr. Kunze could win more digital freedoms for us all.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday January 20 2017, @08:12AM
SD cards use copy protection for recordable media with device revocation.
..which probably just reinforces your point.