Quote:
Originally Posted by combatmedic
Wow, that's reaching back really far!
|
It is, but I truly believe that electronic storage provides a quantum leap in the ability to conserve data. Whether humanity will avail themselves of it is another question. But the potential does exist. Not so much in the longevity of any particular storage unit (which I understand is comparatively low for electronic storage), but in the ease of copying the content of an old unit to a new one.
Though I do expect individual units to improve in longevity too. There's a project that has experimented with using glass disks for long-term storage and they claim that the disks can last at least 50,000 years.
There's always the risk of someone making a political decision not to bother to conserve old data, of course. Or sheer accident destroying a copy of an archive. If that archive isn't backed up, the data is lost. But we know that Vland has at least one institution whose purpose is to conserve all knowledge it can get its hands on, and I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to a number of other worlds.
Hans