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Old 06-19-2010, 10:45 AM   #63
J. Strnad
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I looked up the Wiki entry on the Library at Alexandria, trying to find the number of "books" it shelved. "Books" were scrolls at that time and it could take several scrolls to contain a complete book. Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for scrolls, tens of thousands for books.

With digital editions, we can expect that thousands of people and entities have or will have thousands of books. Even if the Earth were physically destroyed, if a single SD card survived (the right SD card, of course), more books could be "saved" than ever existed at Alexandria.

If people were completely wiped out and this card were discovered by aliens, without some kind of Rosetta Stone technology, accessing the data and translating it would be a nigh-impossible task.

Imagine this future civilization, human or alien, that has for generations learned of the previous world only through surviving paper illustrations and books, suddenly discovering how to access all of the electronic data left behind! It would blow their minds.
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