Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data…
This is awesome, I was talking about this with some friends, debating what is truly the best way to store data for long term (on the scale of thousands of years)
Backing up all of human knowledge and history onto such plates actually seems like a worthy endeavor.
Imagine if we had such detailed records about civilizations thousands of years ago!
We have demonstrated time and time again that if you have a bunch of data unencrypted, it is actually quite trivial to reverse engineer it and decipher it.
Dead sea scrolls, Rosetta stone, etc.
This would be terabytes of data, and likely organized in a way to make it very intuitive to reverse engineer even by someone who has no idea how it works.
We could even case study this. Give a loaded one of these slates to some scientists who have no idea how the data on them is stored and have them try and decipher it.
If they can reasonably succeed quickly with no knowledge on how it works, then it should be easy for someone thousands of years from now too.
I’ve always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don’t know because we are just completely different.
Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn’t know it.
The Voyager records came with the player and instructions for the hopeful alien discoverer to use.