this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
207 points (96.4% liked)
Hardware
5016 readers
25 users here now
This is a community dedicated to the hardware aspect of technology, from PC parts, to gadgets, to servers, to industrial control equipment, to semiconductors.
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to electronic hardware
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is awesome, I was talking about this with some friends, debating what is truly the best way to store data for long term (on the scale of thousands of years)
Backing up all of human knowledge and history onto such plates actually seems like a worthy endeavor.
Imagine if we had such detailed records about civilizations thousands of years ago!
We have demonstrated time and time again that if you have a bunch of data unencrypted, it is actually quite trivial to reverse engineer it and decipher it.
Dead sea scrolls, Rosetta stone, etc.
This would be terabytes of data, and likely organized in a way to make it very intuitive to reverse engineer even by someone who has no idea how it works.
We could even case study this. Give a loaded one of these slates to some scientists who have no idea how the data on them is stored and have them try and decipher it.
If they can reasonably succeed quickly with no knowledge on how it works, then it should be easy for someone thousands of years from now too.
I've always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don't know because we are just completely different.
Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn't know it.
The Voyager records came with the player and instructions for the hopeful alien discoverer to use.