Historians Fear 21st Century Will Be 'Black Hole'

[bpm195]

Personally I'd expect within another generation or two data storage practices will improve and some problems will be solved just because more people know what they're doing. For instance, how many people do you know that 10 years ago would have meticulously kept photo ablums, but now they just keep a single soft copy? It's hard for other people in my family to grasp that back ups are very minimal effort for a lot of protection, but I imagine in another 10 years people will just back up their photos without any real effort (automated or manually).

I'm also expecting that there will be a trend toward file formats and device standards that last for exceptionally long times. USB 2 was finalized 4 years after one and 8 years before USB3, so I'm hoping that the gap between 4 and 5 will be 32 years. Of course, history has shown that if you give developers more resources they'll developed more was to do less, but I can dream.

 

[BenzSmoke]

Then we build a digital archive to store our information. I don't see the problem here.

 

[zehydra]

I've been talking about this for years. But really, we shouldn't let things like this bother us too much right now, as the future generations haven't even been born yet.

 

[RollForInitiative]

They raise a perfectly good point. It becomes significantly more difficult to learn anything from or about the past if there's nothing there to study.

 

[Kurt Cristal]

I feel like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex already covered this phenomenon pretty well.

 

[GothmogII]

They raise a perfectly good point. It becomes significantly more difficult to learn anything from or about the past if there's nothing there to study.

They do have point, but, their fallacy is in thinking that books would last that much longer. Perhaps a couple of hundred years, maybe a thousand, depending on the production methods. So it really isn't such a long term solution. That said, there's the Dead Sea Scrolls which are what, centuries old?

Now, it's a good thing I think to attempt to preserve information, however, there's limitations on how this may be accomplished, unless we're going to go back to making stone carvings.