Is it ever ok to let information die?

In the past, a group’s stories, legends, history, and religious beliefs were passed from generation to generation by word of mouth or documented in drawings or written languages of the day.

That’s because from the earliest times, the human race has been prodded by an unwritten mandate to pass the rapidly growing base of knowledge and information from one generation to the next.

Ancient Egyptians, for example, expanded upon the writing systems of previous cultures and developed the hieroglyphic writing system. It evolved over many centuries but it was still in use as recently as 400 AD. That’s when something better – the Greek alphabet – came along and was embraced by the intelligentsia.

Within 100 years hieroglyphic symbols were no longer decipherable. The messages in those beautifully painted and carved symbols were locked away, seemingly forever, until the Rosetta Stone was uncovered in 1799. Fortunately, the messaging in that stone was written in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, allowing for translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic portion and providing the key to translate other hieroglyphic texts.

That was a close call – a language and a valuable historical accounting of the world that was almost lost forever. Could that happen again? Could a writing or a data storage system become not only obsolete, but completely undecipherable over the course of five to ten generations? After all, new and better technology is always on the horizon, like the Greek alphabet and cloud storage.

If you think that can never happen, think again. It’s happening all the time.

We’re losing languages left and right. As many as 90% of the world’s languages could be gone by 2100 by some estimates. And along with them, goes valuable insights into past cultures and communities, all critical pieces for understanding the human race as it exists today.

If we look at the bigger picture, any circa 1820 book that has survived fire, flood and careless destruction is readable today. Sure, life was simpler in 1820 and books were the primary repository of information. We still have the ability to read the information in those books.

But, think about all that’s happened since then, though, beginning with phonograph records developed later that same century to capture and store sound. Now imagine an archeologist 200 years in the future unearthing a floppy disk, cassette tape, or video on a CD. Will any of that data be recoverable?

Even today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a computer with a drive for a floppy disk. In fact, it’s doubtful that any of today’s reader devices will still exist even 50 years from now, let alone in 200 years.

One of the ideas behind cloud computing was to free users from the ever-changing nature of storage devices by using remote storage in server farms far, far away. Is our data safe and recoverable in the cloud for all eternity? Keep in mind, data centers require ongoing power and ongoing attention. What if something goes wrong? Even redundant systems aren’t foolproof.

And regardless of the technology, should we be concerned that the vast majority of “humanity’s data” lies in the hands of private corporations? Companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, and Microsoft have staked their future on the value of the information archived in their data centers.

However, if one of these corporations ceases to exist, what’s the protocol for dealing with all the information residing on their servers? Thinking long-term, and knowing that only a very small percentage of companies survive long enough to celebrate their 50th anniversary, let alone their 100th or 200th, how much of this information will still exist 200 years from now?

Is it the government’s job to preserve information and keep it available to the public? In fact, the National Archives and Records Administration has the remarkable mission to preserve certain materials that are “important to the workings of Government, have long-term research worth, or provide information of value to citizens.” NARA is doing a great job, no doubt. But who decides what classic book, audio recording, or blueprint is included? Who’s responsible for humankind’s mandate to protect and pass on the terabytes of information that don’t make NARA’s cut?

Maybe that’s the bigger question we should consider … Not whether any information will ever be irretrievable, but should all information be stored for all time? And if so, who gets to decide?

What we need is a long-term strategy for data preservation, and by long term I mean 1,000 years or more. And at the very least let’s make sure NARA is saving instructions and documentation for every data storage device as it comes along, including the floppy drive and digital tape player.

A couple years ago my wife and I visited the beautiful Spanish city of Segovia located in the center of Spain about an hour northwest of Madrid.

At the heart of the city, nestled close to its historic shopping district, are the iconic aqueducts built during the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years. Although the exact dates of construction cannot be confirmed, the latest evidence would suggest a start date of roughly 112 AD.

The Segovian Aqueduct has long intrigued me because it represents a rare piece of history from the distant past.

While there are a few dozen structures older than the aqueducts with the best known being the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek Parthenon, and the Roman Coliseums, there are indeed several that are much older.

The little known Cairn of Barnenez in France is widely considered to be the oldest man-made structure on planet earth, estimated to have been built in 4800 BC.

Two others, the Tumulus of Bougon and the Tumulus of St. Michel were also built in France in that era. All three were tombs or burial sites with very little known about their actual origin.

Wikipedia has a listing of 106 ancient structures that were built before the BC age ended. To be sure, none exist in any usable form other than a tourist attraction or center of archeological research.

The one exception may be Stonehenge. Since we have no idea what its function or purpose was, it may be working fine and we just don’t know it. (We love to joke about Stonehenge.)

However, it brings up an interesting question about how much of our society today will still exist 2,000 years from now.

India’s Statue of Unity

The 2,000-year test

If we look around the world, what buildings, structures, sculptures, or artifacts of our world will still be present in the year 4,000?

When it comes to famous buildings, will we still have:

1. Taj Mahal in India
2. Angkor Wat in Cambodia
3. Sydney Opera House
4. Eiffel Tower in Paris
5. Singjiang Hotel in China
6. St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow
7. Lotus Temple in New Delhi
8. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
9. Guggenheim in New York
10. Capital Building in Washington D.C.

When it comes to iconic works of art, will we still have:

1. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota
2. Michelangelo’s “David” in Florence
3. “Rapa Nui” on Easter Island
4. Petra in Jordan
5. The Arch in St Louis
6. India’s giant Statue of Unity
7. Statue of Liberty in New York
8. “Terracotta Army” in China
9. Machu Picchu in Peru
10. “The Bean” in Chicago

If we think about infrastructure, will we still have:

1. The Great Wall of China
2. The Panama Canal
3. The “Chunnel” between France and the U.K.
4. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
5. Palm Island in Dubai
6. Three Gorges Dam in China
7. Marmaray Tunnel in Turkey
8. Skytree in Tokyo
9. Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado
10. Guri Dam in Venezuela

The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation, formed in 1996, is a San Francisco non-profit organization pushing the idea of very long-term thinking and planning. Founded by Steward Brand and Danny Hillis in 1996, it aims to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mindset and promote “slower/better” thinking. As a Foundation, it hopes to create a long vision framework for operating over the next 10,000 years.

According to Steward Brand, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed – some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.”

The Foundation has several ongoing projects, including the Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock. This mechanical clock, which is under construction, is designed to keep accurate time for 10,000 years. The manufacture and site construction of the first full-scale prototype clock has been funded with $42 million from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, and is being built on land which Bezos owns in Texas.

The 10,000-year clock.

But human nature shows a different side

Human nature is often a disturbing thing to witness.

One of the tactics used by leaders throughout history has been to destroy all records of the past as a form of cultural cleansing. So no thinking about the future or the past. Here are a few examples:

• 363 AD – The Royal Library of Antioch, once the cultural capital of the ancient world, was destroyed in 363 by Christian Emperor Jovian, who was convinced that the library was densely stocked with “unholy” literature.
• 1,200 – Nalanda was a large Buddhist monastery in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, and one of the largest repositories of Buddhist knowledge in the world. Sadly, the whole complex was destroyed by a Turkic military general of Qutub al-Din Aybak, the founder of the Turkic dominion in the northwest of India.
• 1258 – The House of Wisdom was a major intellectual hub during the Islamic Golden Age, but it was sadly destroyed in 1258 when Mongols invaded Baghdad.
• 1937-1945 – During WWII, Japanese military forces destroyed or partly destroyed numerous Chinese libraries including:
  • National University of Tsing Hua, Peking (lost 200,000 of 350,000 books)
  • University Nan-k’ai, T’ien-chin (totally destroyed, 224,000 books lost)
  • Institute of Technology of He-pei, T’ien-chin (completely destroyed)
  • Medical College of He-pei, Pao-ting (completely destroyed)
  • Agricultural College of He-pei, Pao-ting (completely destroyed)
  • University Ta Hsia, Shanghai (completely destroyed)
  • University Kuang Hua, Shanghai (completely destroyed)
  • National University of Hunan (completely destroyed)

Will our time systems still be the same 2,000 years from now?

Final Thoughts

Thinking through the artifacts that will continue for the next 2,000, my initial thoughts focused on tombstones. I have serious doubts that cemeteries will survive, but the tombstones themselves are rather impervious to environmental degradation.

This is also true for anything underground such as tunnels and caves. Once something is removed from extreme temperatures and extreme weather, overall deterioration slows considerably.

Will we still have airports, railroad lines, highways, power lines, waterlines, or landfills?

Drilling deeper, will any of our systems survive? Will we still use electricity, paper currency, the 24-hour clock, the metric system, or the Gregorian calendar?

Technology is quickly outdating every new format for information. We’ve gone from 4-track, to 8-track, to the old 8” disks, to 5.25” disks, followed by 3.5” disks, thumb drives, remote backups, and whatever comes next.