Yeah, it's so tragic. China suffered this during the Cultural Revolution, looting and burning their own temples and priceless tomes.
You know how we have an arctic seed bank? We should fund an international Culture Bank and put it in some remote place. Put a sample of all the cool stuff there for future generations, especially the books.
Digitizing media doesn't fill me with a sense of certainty. Lots of websites and links from the mid 90s are all broken or dead. Who knows what will happen to Wikipedia in 50 years let alone 200 years.
I want physical objects, buried in an earthquake free zone, at a temperature that is stable year-round, with no exposure to light. Something that we can guarantee will last over 10,000 years.
I'm not talking about burning it all on CDs and keeping them in a shed, there are absolutely ways to preserve digital information for longer time periods and there are a lot of people working on figuring out the best ways to do just that. And it's not like books last for 10 000 years, either.
As a Gamer and history enthusiast the number of games that are just gone is astonishing. These things were made and played on many computers, and yet somehow we just don't have them anymore.
China has done a much better perseving their shit than other nations, to be fair. Still lost quite a bit but not nearly as bad as Europe and the Middle East. There is barely anything left of American cultures.
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u/Xciv 26d ago
Yeah, it's so tragic. China suffered this during the Cultural Revolution, looting and burning their own temples and priceless tomes.
You know how we have an arctic seed bank? We should fund an international Culture Bank and put it in some remote place. Put a sample of all the cool stuff there for future generations, especially the books.