Thread: In the year 2357, a cautionary thought...

In the year 2357 will there be a builder rootling around in the dusty attic of a soon to be demolished building and come across a dusty, hessian wrapped, parcel and within discover a JPEG dating from 2006, and say “WOW! George, I think I have found a long lost Bloggsworth!”. Will his mate, digging around in another dimly lit recess beside the corballing against the party wall retrieve a battered iPad; its Morocco leather case covered in verdigris, and barely held together by rotting stitching; and opening it up exclaim “Jim! Jim! I think I’ve found the missing manuscript for Travails with my Aunt by Serge Tootenferry”.

Clearly the answer is no, it will not happen, so before you entrust your life’s work to the Cloud, and bearing in mind that at least one person has already lost everything, think about it.

Time destroys pretty much everything given enough of it. What has the chance to survive a century? What might survive longer? So far, music, literature, and metal coins are the only things I can think of that have managed to survive past the century mark (I include coins because they do have some artistic value).

How many people have a floppy drive in their computer? How many of you have seen a 5 1/4" floppy? How about an 8" floppy? These are thing that are only a couple decades old, and already are nearly museum items. Outside of a movie, I almost never use a cd drive anymore. Between networks and thumb drives I rarely ever burn anything to cd/dvd anymore. If you really expect something you have done to survive, you have to convince someone else (many of them) that it warrants being kept around.

I saw an interesting documentary that looked into this. It seems that things written in stone survive the longest (1000s of years) but even they dissapear eventually.