(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
People don't like to be forgotten. We do everything in our power to prevent our short lives from sinking into oblivion after we are dead. Entire buildings, paintings and businesses are created so that our name can be placed on something that is more lasting than ourselves.
Right now, we are leaving more than ever before, with millions of digital photos, websites and documents. There is some comfort in sharing and storing good memories, but data on the web may not be as lasting as we think.
The documentary The End of Memory take a look at the storage media we have today. As storage technology evolved and became more sophisticated, the lifetime of the data actually became shorter. Movies last for 100 years, and vinyl 50 years on average. The CD was considered perpetual, until researchers at the French research institute LNE tore it down from the pedestal in 2003. Jacques Perdereau at LNE found that oxidation shortens the life of 15 percent of tested CDs to 1 – 5 years, and the other 85 percent lasted only for 20 years.
Other storage media such as memory sticks and SD cards can safely store our archives for over 1000 years, but only if each disk is used only once to store data. A memory stick can withstand a limited number of overwrites before it crashes. So the SD card in your camera doesn't last very long.
cloud storage (Cloud Storage) is the newest of extensively used storage media. These "clouds" are actually data centers that make use of disks. The only way to make cloud data safe is to always copy the data to many data centers across the globe, so that when a disk crashes or a fire destroys an entire data center, your data is still there.
If the short life span of today's storage media is not daunting enough, the threat is not primarily in the media itself. A good, old-fashioned floppy disk may still contain data, but we no longer have easy access to the means to retrieve that data. What once seemed to be the top medium for data transfer was shut down in just a few decades.
Quartz and DNA. This means that the pace of technological development is in itself a threat to all the new storage media we come up with. This is why researchers are trying to find ways to decipher data with equipment that will also be here in the future. Among this equipment is the microscope. Researchers at Kyoto University have found a way to store information on the mineral quartz – information that can be retrieved using a simple microscope.
Quartz is heat and acid resistant, giving it an expected lifespan of "between 300 million and several billion years". DNA strands are also being developed to be used for storing information. The European Bioinformatics Institute transmitted, among other things, a sonnet by Shakespeare and the most famous speech of Martin Luther King jr. to the four DNA letters (A, C, T and G). Another laboratory was able to decode this information.
DNA must be stored in a cool, dry place without sunlight – but as long as it is done correctly, it can last a long time. In 2013, a dissertation published in the journal Nature showed that researchers were able to read most of the 700-year-old horse DNA. Quartz and DNA may be the storage media of the future.
From here to the moon. The need for long-term storage is not only a manifestation of vanity, but is crucial to our existence. Places where radioactive waste is stored, such as Andra in France, use barcodes to indicate the contents of the barrels. The idea that radioactive material can be dug up because the barcodes can no longer be read, as is the case for floppy disks and soon probably also CDs, is not very appealing.
There is no doubt that it is necessary to store radioactive waste for centuries to come, but what about all the other data we store? Only in 2011 did we produce information that corresponds to what is stored on a stack of CDs that reach from the earth to the moon. Information consists of web pages, photos and status updates. To determine the usefulness of this information for future generations, we can take a look at one of the largest archives we have from earlier times: the archives of the Venetian city-state.
The 80-kilometer archive consists of birth and death certificates, business accounts and police documents. The important thing, according to Frédéric Kaplan, professor at EPFL Lausanne, is that it contains not only documents about the rich citizens of historic Venice, but about everyone. In that sense, our data collection on the internet is pretty similar.
It does not cost much money to arrange cloud storage or to create a website. It is important to remember that a large part of the world is without internet access and for that matter electricity – but more people than ever have an internet connection in one form or another.
This raises questions about the usefulness of the enormous amounts of data we store today. A serious risk is that future historians will not be able to single out what is actually valuable in the overwhelming amount of data available. If we continue to develop storage media based on DNA or quartz, we must also think about reducing the overload of information for future analysts.
Time Capsule. It is necessary for us humans to know where we come from. I live in Berlin, and I get reminders of the Cold War every time I cross the remains of the Berlin Wall on my way to the mall. Only 25 years ago, people were shot if they tried to take the trip I am now taking without difficulty – but this is tricky to grasp. The human mind cannot imagine suffering of a kind it has never experienced. Therefore, we need images, movies, books and documents (and perhaps virtual reality and installed platforms in the future) to remember, as a species, the things we have done. Then we must also be able to distinguish between important and unimportant documents.
One possible solution could be to make a time capsule every decade with the information we believe is most important. This information in itself – and the fact that we consider this to be important – tells a lot about how we perceive the world today, and can help the people of the future to find meaning in our present. It is imperative to remember where we come from.
