From what I understand, a lot of knowledge was lost following the collapse of the Roman Empire as manuscripts were no longer being copied at the established frequency and information that had lost relevance (for certain jobs etc.) wasn’t being passed down.

If a catastrophic event were to happen nowadays, how much information would we theoretically lose? Is the knowledge of the world, stored digitally or on printed books, safer than it was before?

All the information online for example - does that have a greater chance of surviving millennia than say a preserved manuscript?

  • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
    0·
    7 months ago

    As of yet, much would be lost, especially anything produced from the 1980s forward.

    That said, a number of millennial-grade digital archival solutions have been prototyped so far. Assuming we had a some forewarning, I think we could save quite a bit.

    With a day or two of lead time, I expect we could save all digitized publications and many key databases. Beyond that, we would need to prioritize data into volumes to encode our “greatest hits.”

    Ultimately a huge amount of data stored today, especially since the age of big data and AI, is unlikely to contribute much of consequence to the collected works and knowledge of humanity in retrospect. That kernel remains fairly small and more easily preserved.