• n big picture, this problem is not only for digital data. It is very big. What if we have preserved all books in ENGLISH today, but ENGLISH itself might gets extinct after couple of decades. I remember that same problem raised when USA government had to bury their radio active waste.

    I remember reading that another part of the problem for the radioactive waste problem was they needed to use a medium that would last for millennia. I seem to recall one of the solutions mooted was to etch the records on to stone tablets because that was about the only thing that could be guaranteed not to degrade.

    I also remember my high school technology teacher telling us that the designs for the Harrier Jump Jet were stored on punched tape in a fireproof room because that would survive the EM pulse from a nuclear detonation. This was in the mid-90's so there were other storage media available but they were all magnetic. I imagine shortly after that the designs were transferred to CD though.


    On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
    —Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

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