Is the combined knowledge of humanity safer than it has ever been?
Is the combined knowledge of humanity safer than it has ever been?
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.
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.
The concern about digital media compatibility and longevity is definitely valid. But even in the unlikely event that all electronics simultaneously went kaput, the knowledge to recreate working systems, as well as the materials, are still going to be there. Also, the average person has more knowledge than even just 200 years ago, not too mention the fact there is still more print media around than then too.
Yes our current global data footprint could take a massive hit, and would feel like a huge step back, but it's still going to be comparatively huge compared to any other time in history. Not so much going back to the stone age as going back to the 1980s.
Information his always degraded over time. Some being lost, some being made obsolete, some evolving (like culture). I think given our short term digital experience as a species we just find it a bit of existential crisis to view our digital data as having a shelf life too.
The problem of restoration after a catastrophic event might be less technical and more about sifting the knowledge from the misinformation and idiocy. There's worthwhile known fiction as well, cultural icons that are understood in context but after a longer loss might just be clutter, or even cause trouble.
Think about how, after the fall of the Roman Empire, a lot of technical knowledge was lost but the Bible was not only preserved but increased its influence in the practice of medicine, and politics, maybe architecture, certainly art. What if, instead of every town having a church full of gilded pictures of saints, there were pictures showing how to build an aqueduct and bath house? Or even cat pictures? Arguably keeping cat-worship alive could have prevented the devastating losses of the Black Plague.
Unless special means to safekeep it are done, electronic means of data storage are less likely to survive a millennia than papers kept in a cave, assuming no one is around to maintain things.
I can't remember who did it (Discovery, BBC or History Channel; one of those), but there was a whole big documentary special about what would happen to Earth if humans just up and vanished one day. About the only things that would really last a decent amount of time, were things made of granite or marble or other stone not much affected by erosion.
There's a thin chance written media would be OK depending on what drives us back.
The British library gets a copy of every book published . The Smithsonian has 145+ cubic feet of archives.
Now both are in prime targets for a nuke so it's only a chance.
145 cubic feet seems like not a lot. Archives of what? Books?
An event today equivalent to the collapse of the Roman Empire could very well trigger a nuclear war.
Nuclear weapons create electromagnet pulses (EMPs) that will wipe every every magnetic storage device, and destroy every semiconductor, that isn't hardened or shielded. Which means the only computers that will survive are those made from specific EMP resistant semiconductors (gallium arsenide usually) used for military applications, or stored in a faraday cage.
Books will fare better than historically, mostly because of the sheer volume of them we have. Unfortunately the least useful books will be the ones with the best chance of surviving, there's millions of copies of 50 shades of grey, so that will almost certainly survive, on the other hand there's probably only a few thousand copies of obscure textbooks on things like building steam engines we will need to rebuild society.
EMP really doesn't affect nearly as much as we've been lead to believe.
A direct lightning bolt to a car (millions of volts), doesn't destroy the ECM - a car will start right up afterwards.
An EMP is a magnetic field - an impacted device must attenuate that field (i.e. act like an antenna) to generate an electrical pulse on it's circuits. Plus the energy of any field dissipates as a square of the distance. Trying to get millions of volts into a device via magnetic pulse is a serious challenge.
Just a stone toss away from the World Seed Bank is the Arctic World Archive which houses tons of data in an arctic vault that can last up to a thousand years.
Question is: will humanity remember it even exists?
Think about something like a roman empire speedrun. A series of smaller wars (not even nuclear), economic downfall, a few crop failures, refugee crises, political turmoil. Will anyone remember the vault after 50 years? Will anyone stumble upon it? Will raiders sell the surviving tech for food?
I have a feeling it is all-but-guaranteed that most of the world's digital knowledge will be erased overnight during the next event such as this one...
Check out the Carrington Event of 1859.
How could one protect electronics/hard disks/etc from a Crrington type event?
I think we'd be fucked, basically.