From what I understand, a lot of knowledge was lost following the collapse of the Roman Empire as manuscripts were no longer being copied at the established frequency and information that had lost relevance (for certain jobs etc.) wasn’t being passed down.
If a catastrophic event were to happen nowadays, how much information would we theoretically lose? Is the knowledge of the world, stored digitally or on printed books, safer than it was before?
All the information online for example - does that have a greater chance of surviving millennia than say a preserved manuscript?
No,
The best non-archival grade digital storage media will last decades at best, including optical Media like CD/DVD formats.
We’re in what’s considered a “digital dark age” where most of our digital backups will not survive in their current form and endless copying will eventually corrupt the data. There are archival grade systems that can theoretically store data for hundreds of years, but obviously we haven’t had a chance to test that yet.
But I think the biggest issue is compatibility.
If I were to hand you a 5¼ floppy disc with data on it, what’s the likelihood you have the equipment on hand to read that data right now? It’s pretty slim but it’s possible. But they’re not making 5¼ drives anymore and we’re left with what’s on hand.
200 years in the future, if someone finds an archival grade DVD long after the standard has been replaced, it’s highly unlikely they’ll have the equipment or software to read it.
The second issue is electricity.
If something like a Carrington event level solar flare happens and knocks us back to the Stone age for a generation or so, we’ll be able to read our remaining knowledge from ink and paper just fine, but we won’t have a prayer of accessing the digital information.
You need to remember that digital storage is less than a century old, we’re just scratching the surface of this tech now and we haven’t even come close to revealing all of its secrets, things are going to continue changing rapidly for the foreseeable future and a consequence of that is leaving old tech behind.
Plus even if we get a working system to read a disk, the next problem is data encoding. Data is either compressed, encrypted, or both.
While a Carrington event would be catastrophic, it won’t be even a generation (80 years) before some capacity to access digital data returns. I’d argue it would be days to months.
Carrington wouldn’t wipe out everything, just a lot of things, mostly power supply related, at the consumer level from my understanding, and that would be things that are connected to a sensitive grid. Any laptop or tablet not currently on power would be fine, and their switching power supply would likely be protective (In that it would probably fry first).
I’ve worked on disaster recovery plans that would survive Carrington, during which I studied extant data centers (which would survive one without missing a beat, because Carrington is a subset of the risks they’ve mitigated). Some were capable of surviving things like a direct impact of a Cat5 hurricane, 1000 year flood events, had power filtering on a massive scale (their greater concern was malicious actors), multiple redundancies of power sources (last one I reviewed had 5 separate power providers each coming in from a different direction, each capable of running the entire facility, with on-site generation capable of running for a week before needing fuel).
So if data centers like these are already operational, just think about the engineering and planning that started more than 20 years ago (one data center I reviewed had been operational since 2005), and what these same engineers/teams have been looking to mitigate.
Then there’s all of us
home hoarders, self-hosters, and their combined planning and capability. Many of us already run commercial power management (full-isolation UPS), with a variety of storage systems, backups, etc.Seems to me the greater challenge with disaster is connecting unaffected resources to impacted locations.
Just a quick correction, but there are 5 generations to a century, a generation is 20 years.
Arguably, the time from when a girl is born until she becomes a mother herself is rising significantly.
That time might have been 20 years a century ago but is closer to 25-30 years in western countries now.
But our knowledge is more widely recorded on paper than ever before!
True, but communication would be a bitch. Sure, the info might be stored somewhere, but finding out who and what and where and getting it to where it needs to be, without electricity? That’d be a bitch.
I guess something like this (data stored on glass plates ‘Project Silica’) would store the data safely for a much longer period. What I’m not entirely clear on is whether it would still be possible to read that data in the far future - it seems to rely on some kind of machine learning to decode it.
I’ve always been talking about the AOL CD’s, and when Historians do their excavations and find them…
the paint on many old CDs speeds up their decay