Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
I never really thought about it much before this thread, but how secure do we feel our current technology is? I mean, can we envision a human disaster that would leave us without the long term ability to read DVDs, hard drives, etc?
If we move away from paper archival, then we are very dependent on technology to read magnetic storage. But that's not the sort of thing you can do by just being clever - you have to maintain your technological and manufacturing capacity. If we had a major disaster in the form of an asteroid hit, plague, nuclear holocaust, etc would we really expect to be able to preserve digital archives for any period of time?
And of all times in human history, that would be when we most need to preserve the knowledge and history of humans in order to survive. What a shame if it knocked us into another dark ages due to the digital dependence.
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Interesting thoughts Bob.
If we want to preserve our written culture over time, the eBook is a good way to do it. Design an EP (or similarly low-powered) screen eReader in a waterproof durable case. The back of the case is a panel of solar cells. Put it on a windowsill to charge it. The "battery" is a very long-lived storage medium --
perhaps a capacitor. The reader has vast (terabytes) non-volatile memory -- enough for many reference works that can be accessed via touchscreen technology. The user can save notes on the reader too. The interface to the reader is infrared that can work through the case. The case is seamless with no ports to allow water or dust inside. The reader can operate off of sunlight alone, long after the battery becomes nonfunctional.
Now the reading public can obtain these ubiquitous readers for the price of a fast-food lunch. They all come with basic reference works already installed -- encyclopedia, multilingual dictionaries, and more. Then the user adds whatever their interests dictate. Odds are that over time, with enough readers extant, most important works will be captured.
Then if the dreaded civilization-killer occurs, there will be enough working readers around to preserve a base of knowledge from which to recover. The uBiquitous eReader -- I want one.