In a 1000 years even if they don’t have the drives, as long as they still know roughly how it works maybe they will photograph it with a microscope and read the tracks in the M-Disc from that. Then they will have to decode it also of course.
Maybe. The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.
If, instead, we are talking about some human disaster and, that constant copies is lost at some point, we're kind of stuck. I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done. It would be a massive reverse engineering effort and I don't think they will even know to start doing that with these weird disks that the agents had.
If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked, although we sometimes can't read the letters but at least seeing something with the eyes says there's something and if there's enough of them we have decoded language.
The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long. Paper has only been stored successfully in Egypt for that long. I'm sure there are other deserts though that would count just as well.
Not sure what kind of present-day data the historians of the future would be interested in.
If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked […] The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long.
Well, paper would best be stored in a fairly dry place, so deserts may be a starting point.
Generally the only institutions / organizations that have managed to survive for centuries / millennia have been monasteries. Temples/churches have often been close to communities for public worship, but most religious traditions seem to have groups of individuals that were a bit more 'removed' from society at large. Organizing around such things could be attempted (a plot point in Stephenson's Anathem.)
Generally burying stuff and leaving clues so that an 'advanced enough' society can unbury it at some point may be another idea.
Lots of old books survive. They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy. Before the printing press, that was entirely by hand. one of the main purposes of those monasteries you mentioned is to copy relevant works for the next generation. Well, maybe I should say the next ten generations or however long books last depending on the local climate.
Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work. Some years ago a town near me had a big unburying of a vault they had saved for 50 years. In there was a brand new car complete with gas in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000. The gas was stale and unusable. The car was completely rusted the point where it couldn't be restored. The only answer that you can be confident of storing something is if someone every few years personally looks at it and verifies it is still in good shape and if not repairs it. Archaeologists can learn a lot from garbage and trash that was buried with no attempt to save it. However, archaeologists are also very aware of the limitations of what they can get. There is a lot they know they don't know because, well, this would not have been saved or been preserved.
They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy.
Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.
Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work.
So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.
A lot of the classics we have today are copies of copies of copies. The Dead sea scrolls are the oldest known copy of the bible, and nobody believes they are originals. They are mostly interesting because they can help us track down where copies made a mistake and so the text we consider original today might be wrong. (but we don't know - there is also the possibility those scrolls were put hidden because when checking the copy they found mistakes and so put them where they wouldn't be used - not wanting to destroy the parts that were God's word)
I think 1,000 years maybe doesn't matter that much. However, these predictions are imperfect. If they're aiming for 1,000 years, that makes me more confident the disc will be readable in 100 years, which may matter more.
Issue with storage is you need shelf stability without ongoing electrical/mechanical work refreshing data time to time. Masked ROMs and M-Discs are those two things which can really last a very long time; Floppies, Hard Disks, Solid State Storage and present day ROMs all require periodic costs, efforts and refreshes to keep them going (that means they can't be kept in storage and then re-opened in 30 years).
We also need a mechanism that outlasts that archival lifespan so how to read Discs or Masked ROMs and how to interpret them, also needs to be stored as well. Repairing electronics is a valuable skill that needs to be passed on across generations as well.
Keeping humans around seems to be the best bet, given how things are going, I wouldn't count on the present set of beings around to preserve any of this information that well either.
Issue with storage is you need shelf stability without ongoing electrical/mechanical work refreshing data time to time.
For what? Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years. Any tiny fraction of a fraction that is important will have been copied thousands, millions, or billions of times into various formats.
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
You know what every one of those things says in common? every generation between when it was created and now has decided it was important and made effort to preserve it. We have no clue or maybe only slight clues of what was lost because at some point some generation decided it wasn't worth preserving. Sometimes it was a hard decision for that generation when they realized they couldn't preserve everything, other times it was not cared about at all. Either way though, it was lost for all time because the chain of caring enough to preserve it was lost.
The data isn’t the valuable aspect of those examples. The metadata is!
We have a bunch of family photos that were preserved for a few generations. It sucks, many of them we know who they are, the most are lost to time and the death of memory.
Pictures without the context are just images of dead people. With the story, they are priceless memories.
Every single thing you cite has been, and will be, copied many times over and preserved that way. e.g. - We don't have the original Bible, we have eleventy-billion copies of it.
I don't disagree that a few things that happen today will be of consequence. I disagree that any single source of that data needs to last for a thousand years in isolation.
There are, I'm sure, one or two examples of thousand+ year old primary sources revealing otherwise lost information that was still relevant in some way. I suspect not many, other than as datum for academics to ponder.
Important information has always survived by copying.
Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various Jewish and Christian biblical canons, including deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism, as well as extrabiblical books. As such, they cast new light on the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity, and their relationship with Jewish religious traditions.
One could similarly imagine a set of M-Discs from today that would be rediscovered 1000 years from now that could prove similarly useful to the people of the future thanks to data on them that has been preserved unaltered since today until then on that set of M-Discs.
The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.
This is a short-sighted view. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the internet has disappeared, and a bunch of spotty bits of that disappeared history are sitting on a single disk somewhere. A huge amount of that information could be interesting and useful to someone for some reason, and it is almost lost now.
Surprised that these are only "1.5x to 3x" the price of regular blurays. Just a tiny bit lower and we could abandon regular blurays themselves, and stop using hard drives for static backups. Making these a standard could save a lot of that sparsely recorded data for the future.
I still can't get over the silent film massacre - so many hit movies by acclaimed directors simply don't exist; or the BBC decades long video wiping spree, or the dumping of the DuMont network archives into the East River. Our views of the past are completely distorted because of these events; people who were unbelievably famous and influential passed into obscurity because most of their work was trashed, wiped, or on the DuMont network.
No reason to assume that things worth keeping will be kept. The assumption actually leads to the inaction that leads to the death of the things.
I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done.
They're not in secret code (unless that was the intention.) If you had one you could figure out how to make a machine to read it.
It would be a massive reverse engineering effort
It would be a moderately difficult reverse engineering effort.
If I’m not mistaken only optics are really unique to BD and need dedicated production? Everything else is rather universal components so even a hobbyist should be able to build a BD reader from scratch - having access to servos, cnc, and 2000s-level electronics?
I think when it comes to precision movement we never went back and we probably won’t go back. We’ll surely have different ways to accomplish it, but society would need to collapse big time for us to not be able to recreate mechanics to operate the laser.
Comments
The drives to read them (Blu-rays) will be the problem. Pioneer stopped manufacturing them in 2024, only LG drives are available now.
Coincidentally I just bought one, they’ve doubled in price now recently.
Also bought some M-Discs to try. They’re half the price in Japan (Amazon) compared to Germany.
In a 1000 years even if they don’t have the drives, as long as they still know roughly how it works maybe they will photograph it with a microscope and read the tracks in the M-Disc from that. Then they will have to decode it also of course.
Maybe. The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.
If, instead, we are talking about some human disaster and, that constant copies is lost at some point, we're kind of stuck. I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done. It would be a massive reverse engineering effort and I don't think they will even know to start doing that with these weird disks that the agents had.
If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked, although we sometimes can't read the letters but at least seeing something with the eyes says there's something and if there's enough of them we have decoded language.
The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long. Paper has only been stored successfully in Egypt for that long. I'm sure there are other deserts though that would count just as well.
The British Domesday Book from 1086 is still referenced by historians for all sorts of purposes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
Not sure what kind of present-day data the historians of the future would be interested in.
Well, paper would best be stored in a fairly dry place, so deserts may be a starting point.
Generally the only institutions / organizations that have managed to survive for centuries / millennia have been monasteries. Temples/churches have often been close to communities for public worship, but most religious traditions seem to have groups of individuals that were a bit more 'removed' from society at large. Organizing around such things could be attempted (a plot point in Stephenson's Anathem.)
Generally burying stuff and leaving clues so that an 'advanced enough' society can unbury it at some point may be another idea.
Lots of old books survive. They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy. Before the printing press, that was entirely by hand. one of the main purposes of those monasteries you mentioned is to copy relevant works for the next generation. Well, maybe I should say the next ten generations or however long books last depending on the local climate.
Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work. Some years ago a town near me had a big unburying of a vault they had saved for 50 years. In there was a brand new car complete with gas in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000. The gas was stale and unusable. The car was completely rusted the point where it couldn't be restored. The only answer that you can be confident of storing something is if someone every few years personally looks at it and verifies it is still in good shape and if not repairs it. Archaeologists can learn a lot from garbage and trash that was buried with no attempt to save it. However, archaeologists are also very aware of the limitations of what they can get. There is a lot they know they don't know because, well, this would not have been saved or been preserved.
Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.
So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.
A lot of the classics we have today are copies of copies of copies. The Dead sea scrolls are the oldest known copy of the bible, and nobody believes they are originals. They are mostly interesting because they can help us track down where copies made a mistake and so the text we consider original today might be wrong. (but we don't know - there is also the possibility those scrolls were put hidden because when checking the copy they found mistakes and so put them where they wouldn't be used - not wanting to destroy the parts that were God's word)
I think 1,000 years maybe doesn't matter that much. However, these predictions are imperfect. If they're aiming for 1,000 years, that makes me more confident the disc will be readable in 100 years, which may matter more.
Issue with storage is you need shelf stability without ongoing electrical/mechanical work refreshing data time to time. Masked ROMs and M-Discs are those two things which can really last a very long time; Floppies, Hard Disks, Solid State Storage and present day ROMs all require periodic costs, efforts and refreshes to keep them going (that means they can't be kept in storage and then re-opened in 30 years).
We also need a mechanism that outlasts that archival lifespan so how to read Discs or Masked ROMs and how to interpret them, also needs to be stored as well. Repairing electronics is a valuable skill that needs to be passed on across generations as well.
Keeping humans around seems to be the best bet, given how things are going, I wouldn't count on the present set of beings around to preserve any of this information that well either.
For what? Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years. Any tiny fraction of a fraction that is important will have been copied thousands, millions, or billions of times into various formats.
- Ozymandias - By Percy Bysshe ShelleyAll sort of things done a thousand years ago still shape how we live today:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_o...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3624887-the-medieval-ori...
Who knows what the actions of a single, seemingly inconsequential, individual could trigger:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip
You know what every one of those things says in common? every generation between when it was created and now has decided it was important and made effort to preserve it. We have no clue or maybe only slight clues of what was lost because at some point some generation decided it wasn't worth preserving. Sometimes it was a hard decision for that generation when they realized they couldn't preserve everything, other times it was not cared about at all. Either way though, it was lost for all time because the chain of caring enough to preserve it was lost.
The data isn’t the valuable aspect of those examples. The metadata is!
We have a bunch of family photos that were preserved for a few generations. It sucks, many of them we know who they are, the most are lost to time and the death of memory.
Pictures without the context are just images of dead people. With the story, they are priceless memories.
Every single thing you cite has been, and will be, copied many times over and preserved that way. e.g. - We don't have the original Bible, we have eleventy-billion copies of it.
I don't disagree that a few things that happen today will be of consequence. I disagree that any single source of that data needs to last for a thousand years in isolation.
There are, I'm sure, one or two examples of thousand+ year old primary sources revealing otherwise lost information that was still relevant in some way. I suspect not many, other than as datum for academics to ponder.
Important information has always survived by copying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls
One could similarly imagine a set of M-Discs from today that would be rediscovered 1000 years from now that could prove similarly useful to the people of the future thanks to data on them that has been preserved unaltered since today until then on that set of M-Discs.
The irony of quoting the work of a poet who died over 200 years ago is thick.
This is a short-sighted view. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the internet has disappeared, and a bunch of spotty bits of that disappeared history are sitting on a single disk somewhere. A huge amount of that information could be interesting and useful to someone for some reason, and it is almost lost now.
Surprised that these are only "1.5x to 3x" the price of regular blurays. Just a tiny bit lower and we could abandon regular blurays themselves, and stop using hard drives for static backups. Making these a standard could save a lot of that sparsely recorded data for the future.
I still can't get over the silent film massacre - so many hit movies by acclaimed directors simply don't exist; or the BBC decades long video wiping spree, or the dumping of the DuMont network archives into the East River. Our views of the past are completely distorted because of these events; people who were unbelievably famous and influential passed into obscurity because most of their work was trashed, wiped, or on the DuMont network.
No reason to assume that things worth keeping will be kept. The assumption actually leads to the inaction that leads to the death of the things.
They're not in secret code (unless that was the intention.) If you had one you could figure out how to make a machine to read it.
It would be a moderately difficult reverse engineering effort.
If I’m not mistaken only optics are really unique to BD and need dedicated production? Everything else is rather universal components so even a hobbyist should be able to build a BD reader from scratch - having access to servos, cnc, and 2000s-level electronics?
It's universal for us, right now.
But that doesn't mean that it will stick around.
History shows that when we figure out a better way to do stuff, we tend use the new way going forward and the old stuff tends to get forgotten.
I think when it comes to precision movement we never went back and we probably won’t go back. We’ll surely have different ways to accomplish it, but society would need to collapse big time for us to not be able to recreate mechanics to operate the laser.