Digital Doomsday

[Karl Frederick]

From the New Scientist website,
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge - tech - 02 February 2010 - New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.300-digital-doomsday-the-end-of-knowledge.html)

"Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?"

[Tars]

If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

Fairly well, I think. Yes, we have "fragile" storage media. But there's a lot of duplication. Human knowledge is probably more durable at this point than in any time during human history. Beats the heck out of papyrus. The 'really important" knowledge tends to force itself to be known more and more widely as time goes on. No doubt there's a huge amount of knowledge from previous centuries lost to us, because its lack oif importance didn't win the Darwinian test of wide distribution over time.