 |
 |
Noting that this post is discussing preservation for at least a 100-year term, we may have either of two problems to deal with! There are two plausible scenarios for human civilization in 2103: either our technology will continue evolving at an exponential rate, meaning that current technology may well be long forgotten (or, if we're lucky, preserved as interesting antiques, as we do cylinder phonographs)...or one of our usual misadventures will have resulted in nuclear war, meaning that the survivors (if any) will be trying to discover how their ancestors created fire, Neither promises much of a future for archiving information, although the first might beat the second assuming the media can last the century! Thus, we need either to migrate the archive each time an improvement is made in information technology, or make sure that along with the media we preserve a means to read it, along with clear instructions on how it is to be used. Obviously, time-related deterioration of both media and hardware have to be considered as well. Finally, we will need space to put the archive...it grows, by definition, and thus we may wind up choosing between space for history and space for population. Further, we have to know where everything is filed once we file it, so we can find it again if necessary! I recall a science-fiction story I read decades ago, in which a civilization had reached the point of colonizing planets just to use their satellites for information storage! In the story, the civilization finally collapse when someone inadvertantly cross-linked a reference, thus denying access to the rest of the archive... Steven C. Barr