Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Actually, we trust print books for many more reasons than because it has been around a long time.
(snip)
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Science Fiction is (at it's best) a genre that makes you think about future possibilities. On this subject, I keep coming back to a series by Roger MacBride Allen that involves massive space travel and terraforming. In it, THE critical archive is paper, kept in a massive satellite in the outer Solar System under non-reactive atmosphere. Why? Because electronic copies are too easy to CHANGE!
Rather than armageddon or accident, I'd fear Conspiracy. When you can easily send an electronic archive of all or at least most of current knowledge to another star system, you can also *select* what you include, and alter that selection. When there's a physical copy, someone can at least go back and verify (and that drives a critical part of the above story.)
See The Ocean of Years by Roger Macbride Allen available in mobi and epub.