Progress on information retention
As technology has progressed over the last few thousand years we’ve taken great strides in making information accessible, available, and dense. Think about it for a moment.
First we had stone tablets and walls. Great longevity, easy to read, but not very portable and there’s only so much you can fit on a wall.
Then we started using skins and paper. Excellent portability, good longevity if it’s stored well. Initially the price was quite high but soon the economies of scale caught up and it was somewhat accessible to a large portion of the population. Finally the printing press made it cheap and easy for everyone.
Now in the information age we have information at our fingertips, instantly available from across the globe. The problem is we have no good way to store it. We rely on the delicate balance of electrical charges, magnetism, and microscopic slices in degradeable surfaces. Even our most carefully preserved digital archives are only expected to last 100 years. It’s a constant shuffle to keep from losing data. What good is progress if we forget about it?
We may be close to the solution: Using bacteria to store date for thousands of years.
With this sort of method we are paving our road to long term species memory and survival. Sure, we may have been fine without it as far as surviving, but the potential for loss was tremendous. Imagine if you will humans established and living in another solar system. Communications between there and earth would take years, decades even. With convential digital data stores, if the colony loses a blueprint for their power generator, there’s no hope of getting a new copy in time. Without records that last far flung human settlements could potentially lose and forget the history of earth. It’s a common theme in science fiction, set far enough in the future human factions splinter and separate enough so that our homeworld is little more than a myth. For the first time it looks like that is a future we can avoid.
No Comments
» Leave one of your ownNo comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment