Data

I have been trying to devise a way to make a physical medium to store digital information that would be able to last for several hundred if not thousand years. Not only would it be storage but it would also have a way to be readable on any technology through time. In order to do this you would need a material that wouldn't degrade and would be extremely durable. New technologies are paving a way for a picture to last for an extremely long time but what do you do when you have thousand of photos and having them indivuadly etchen in to very expensive materail wouldn't be feesable. Also what about documents, code, songs and so many other things.... For example if you were trying to retrieve some data off a hard drive that was 20 years old; lets pretend that the drive still works and by some miracle the data is intact; now find a way to get the data off of it, there is no computer on the market today that would come with a connection of that type, almost no retailer would have anything that would make this possible, nothing short of a data recovery center pf some sort would be capable of this. In the end it would probably cost several thousand dollars to get the 2kb file off of it.

Now lets jump ahead 10 years, now get the data off, it would be ten times as hard and cost ten times as much. Now on a more present day tone, you buy an external drive to back up your data, save your pictures and stuff. Now there is two main ways this could go 1) You save everything to it and forget it, it probaly will sit in a box somewhere for several years and the drive could probabaly last about 5-7 years if you are lucky 2) You put everything on the drive and use it all the time, adding stuff general backup, data transfers and the such, this drive will maybe last 2 years maybe.

As we progress the way we store information becomes more and more condensed and fragile. Look at time we began with simple cave drawings that have lasted 10's of thousands of years then to paper that lasts in the hundreds of years, then to digital storage, sure we can store a million times as much in the same amount of space but it will only last a tenth as long. Some may argue that we could just keep on copying the data over and over again but you lose a little each time you do this and soon you have nothing left. As an example take an empty glass then take an identical glass filled with water, now pour the water into the empty glass over and over again, how many times were you able to do this before there wasn't anything left. Now pretend that was a file of several thousand family pictures. How many of those pictures would you have left in 20 years. I would say none.

Think of things that have been copied over and over again over a very long time and think of how they have changed. Lets say as an example... the bible, it is over three thousands years old, mainly written on paper which only lasts a short amount of time, has been copied millions of times, been converted into hundreds of languages and has been subject to the events of time.. Do you really think that it is the same as it was when it was first conceived. You would have to be a complete idiot to think so. I believe that is nearly impossible to comprehend how much it has changed. It is saddening to think that most of the world operates according to this book. Now this brings up another issue, how many file formats, programming languages, operating systems, software, code and the like is there. How many of these things will be readable in ten years, how about twenty or thirty. I dare you to take a flash drive, save an image of yourself to it as a jpg and put it in a safe place pull it out in in a couple of decades. That image disappeared the very second that you set it aside for that time. The worlds history, economy and social records all rely on the very same idea of that flash drive. It is unimaginable what effect that this could have... These things fuel my desire to create a universal language and physical medium to store the worlds information on. But really in a couple of hundred years who will care about who won the cival war, who Einstein was or what you face looked like.