Next Library of Alexandria?

[Ammianus]

[Tinker]

Most printed material is hundreds and even thousands of times redundant.

How many anatomy and physiology or algebra texts do people need access to ultimately?

[Ibrahim]

There still is an excellent library at Alexandria, though obviously it doesn`t have all the cool heretical books that were burn in the 5th century.

[Torchwood]

It's not the key works that matter - they will be safe, although what the future considers a key work many differ - its the ephemeral stuff. From around 1850 (when cheap post arrived) to 1960 (when telephones became almost universal) people wrote letters, and kept many of them. A treasure trove for research. What odds that our emails survive, or this forum?

Is there a digital medium with a long life? CD- ROMs?

[Ibrahim]

[noddy]

ibm did some research into gold punch cards as a real long term archival mechanism - we know more about the ancients than many of the middle aged civilisations (post paper) because a 1 inch deep scratch in rock is fairly disaster proof - this research was around the tradeoffs in size of hole with regards efficiency of information density versus survivability in extreme situations.

for the rest of us, backing up to the internet and different mediums in as many locations as possible is about as good as it gets - 10 years is about the max you can expect from any of the tech so the moment you stop backing up, the clock starts ticking.

you could buy lots of gold sheets and use hand carved morse code to preserve the wisdom of these forums for future civilisations =]

[Tinker]

[Torchwood]

Something I posted on the Other Forum some time ago:

Extract from Wikipedia Galactica version 5.1, galactic standard.

Records are sparse for late 20th century and for 21st century Earth, due to the use of cheap acid paper and primitive electronic media, which did not survive the ravages of time. The history of this period is thus permeated with with myth and conjecture. Look at the alleged names of the Allied leaders in the world war which ravaged the globe in the middle of the 20th century - they are clearly mythical and symbolic:

Churchill = Church Hill
Stalin = man of steel
Eisenhower = hewer of iron
De Gaulle = of France

Who these people really were or whether they even existed, we shall probably never know. A reference found to Stalin as "Djugashvili" is not understood, and may be an obscure Russian insult.

However a recent discovery is exciting scholars. An ancient "internet server" contains the only surviving documents, in the form of online dialogues known as a "forum", from the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, about whom little was otherwise known...

Of course, given that the main surviving philosophies from the period will be the thoughts of L.Ron Hubbard, "diegetics" will be confused with "dianetics"

[Tinker]

Diegetics was a bit of a play on Dianetics on purpose.