SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.