Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won’t last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth’s core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can’t build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we’re pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that’s supposed to last.
Humans are going to persist through the various existential threats, current and future. Some of those impact how inhospitable the future becomes, but we are just breaking out of the dark age of complex life’s timeline. The progress of our species is still accelerating despite the setbacks. Humans are going to keep the data with them, because storage technologies are not going to regress. It doesn’t matter if today’s storage is fragile and prone to decay.
Pretty bold statement there. However, it’s just the civilization that needs to perish, not mankind, for our knowledge to be lost within a few decades.
Considering the number of civilisations that have perished (like, there were quite a lot) vs the number of civilizations that have persisted (uh… One? Which is young and just hasn’t dissolved yet) I’d say the chances for that to happen is definitely not zero. It’s not necessarily one either, of course.
Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won’t last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth’s core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can’t build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we’re pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that’s supposed to last.
Humans are going to persist through the various existential threats, current and future. Some of those impact how inhospitable the future becomes, but we are just breaking out of the dark age of complex life’s timeline. The progress of our species is still accelerating despite the setbacks. Humans are going to keep the data with them, because storage technologies are not going to regress. It doesn’t matter if today’s storage is fragile and prone to decay.
Pretty bold statement there. However, it’s just the civilization that needs to perish, not mankind, for our knowledge to be lost within a few decades.
Considering the number of civilisations that have perished (like, there were quite a lot) vs the number of civilizations that have persisted (uh… One? Which is young and just hasn’t dissolved yet) I’d say the chances for that to happen is definitely not zero. It’s not necessarily one either, of course.