I know this is super long but...

[rickyarbino]

The oldest surviving record of humanity's creativity in the world is European cave paintings, preserved by the right conditions in a cave. Egypt's hieroglyphics will be around for as long as it takes for the stones they are carved into to wear down. They are 'real' in the sense that they are physical things that can be preserved.

The noughts and ones on your hard drive will degrade very quickly without electricity.

Before I proceed, I want to draw the same distinction as Phig.

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

And with that being said, one could also prepare a manually powered hard drive reader and amplifier (would probably work best with older mp3 players tbf) and use that to play things you hadn't managed to cut for your DIY turntable.

[karmacazee]

The oldest surviving record of humanity's creativity in the world is European cave paintings, preserved by the right conditions in a cave. Egypt's hieroglyphics will be around for as long as it takes for the stones they are carved into to wear down. They are 'real' in the sense that they are physical things that can be preserved.

The noughts and ones on your hard drive will degrade very quickly without electricity.

Before I proceed, I want to draw the same distinction as Phig.

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

And with that being said, one could also prepare a manually powered hard drive reader and amplifier (would probably work best with older mp3 players tbf) and use that to play things you hadn't managed to cut for your DIY turntable.

A hard drive, without having any power connected, will last about a decade tops.

I see what people are saying, and I guess I should have been a bit more specific, but different mediums have different lifespans, and most digital technologies rely heavily on complicated, unsustainable systems to keep them going, unlike simpler more mechanical mediums.

[rickyarbino]

Yeah but you can't even produce vinyls in a particularly sustainable fashion.

[dickman69]

go find that time when that virtual mark guy & wolf online fist fought

[nowaysj]

That is like an immovable object and an unstoppable force.

[rickyarbino]

Yeah but you can't even produce vinyls in a particularly sustainable fashion.

Dunno if constantly playing a record would make it last that long either tbf.

[nousd]

analogue has an inherent capacity for infinite gradation/resolution
like zooming in on fractals
and is more readily made physical
e.g. incised stone tablets, magnetic powder on tape, printing ink on paper, blends of scents, cuts in vinyl

whereas digital is more exact as it can be reduced to Yes/No decisions
and therefore more easily calibrated to the limits of human senses & less wasteful of (undetectable or irrelevant) information
Whilst circuitry can create and record digital information, it needs electrical input to retrieve the information
although, with a lot of effort, you could write down all the 0s & 1s involved and translate them
...but then the process becomes analogue because it involves the (fallible) interpretation of symbols

Surely the ideal is combination of whichever components are efficient,
the exemplar being a turntable with analogue record, belt-drive, pick-up and speakers
being processed by energy-efficient digital amplification.

[magma]

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

But they'd be unlikely to survive a change of civilisation, even if electricity was rediscovered. We can stumble across remnants of prehistoric civilisations and because what has been left behind is physical - paintings, buildings, tablets, pottery - we can instantly make inferences into their society and lifestyles. It's not really as simple with digitised data.

If our civilisation goes the way of Ancient Egypt and someone stumbles across a hard disk with surviving data in 2000 years time, they're going to need to re-invent 21st Century digital technology *to our standards* before they'll be able to read it. They'll need to reverse engineer the file system, the IDE/SATA/Whatever interface then they'd need to build some sort of compatible OS... all that adds some pretty hefty entry requirements far more complex than decrypting the Rosetta Stone... so yes, our civilisation's data may be "preserved", but unless a civilisation at least as advanced follows (we're the only one that has existed so far in 200,000 years of our species existence and we'd only have stood a chance for about the last 20 years) a great deal of our knowledge, art and experiences might never be passed on. We could well become another "Dark Age".

Having said that though, we're not a civilisation confined to small fertile areas like a lot of our ancient ancestors; nothing as sprawling as 21st Century humanity has ever existed on this planet. If Stone Henge, Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat are still with us, I very much doubt some of the 20th and 21st Century's more robust buildings won't survive into the millennia. There'll probably even be the odd Banksy about.

[Dystinkt]

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

But they'd be unlikely to survive a change of civilisation, even if electricity was rediscovered. We can stumble across remnants of prehistoric civilisations and because what has been left behind is physical - paintings, buildings, tablets, pottery - we can instantly make inferences into their society and lifestyles. It's not really as simple with digitised data.

If our civilisation goes the way of Ancient Egypt and someone stumbles across a hard disk with surviving data in 2000 years time, they're going to need to re-invent 21st Century digital technology *to our standards* before they'll be able to read it. They'll need to reverse engineer the file system, the IDE/SATA/Whatever interface then they'd need to build some sort of compatible OS... all that adds some pretty hefty entry requirements far more complex than decrypting the Rosetta Stone... so yes, our civilisation's data may be "preserved", but unless a civilisation at least as advanced follows (we're the only one that has existed so far in 200,000 years of our species existence and we'd only have stood a chance for about the last 20 years) a great deal of our knowledge, art and experiences might never be passed on. We could well become another "Dark Age".

Having said that though, we're not a civilisation confined to small fertile areas like a lot of our ancient ancestors; nothing as sprawling as 21st Century humanity has ever existed on this planet. If Stone Henge, Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat are still with us, I very much doubt some of the 20th and 21st Century's more robust buildings won't survive into the millennia. There'll probably even be the odd Banksy about.

very true, but you could argue that the effort we have to go through to understand artefacts such as the rosetta stone would be similar to a different civilisation in the future unlocking the secrets of our technology, making it entirely plausible that digital data would last as long as analogue counterparts. We've essentially had to learn entire dead languages and modus operandi of previous societies to understand and glean information from such artefacts, and the information we have now is still primarily guesswork and conjecture.

On a different note, analogue will always arguably be superior to digital as digital is essentially a replication of analogue processes, therefore without analogue processes to replicate digital formats could not exist.

[rickyarbino]

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

But they'd be unlikely to survive a change of civilisation, even if electricity was rediscovered. We can stumble across remnants of prehistoric civilisations and because what has been left behind is physical - paintings, buildings, tablets, pottery - we can instantly make inferences into their society and lifestyles. It's not really as simple with digitised data.

If our civilisation goes the way of Ancient Egypt and someone stumbles across a hard disk with surviving data in 2000 years time, they're going to need to re-invent 21st Century digital technology *to our standards* before they'll be able to read it. They'll need to reverse engineer the file system, the IDE/SATA/Whatever interface then they'd need to build some sort of compatible OS... all that adds some pretty hefty entry requirements far more complex than decrypting the Rosetta Stone... so yes, our civilisation's data may be "preserved", but unless a civilisation at least as advanced follows (we're the only one that has existed so far in 200,000 years of our species existence and we'd only have stood a chance for about the last 20 years) a great deal of our knowledge, art and experiences might never be passed on. We could well become another "Dark Age".

Having said that though, we're not a civilisation confined to small fertile areas like a lot of our ancient ancestors; nothing as sprawling as 21st Century humanity has ever existed on this planet. If Stone Henge, Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat are still with us, I very much doubt some of the 20th and 21st Century's more robust buildings won't survive into the millennia. There'll probably even be the odd Banksy about.

Yeah but how important is that? Seriously? Those people weren't any more enlightened than us, heck all that remains of their 'civilizations' is, in essence, a bunch of glorified graffiti.

[nobody]

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

But they'd be unlikely to survive a change of civilisation, even if electricity was rediscovered. We can stumble across remnants of prehistoric civilisations and because what has been left behind is physical - paintings, buildings, tablets, pottery - we can instantly make inferences into their society and lifestyles. It's not really as simple with digitised data.

If our civilisation goes the way of Ancient Egypt and someone stumbles across a hard disk with surviving data in 2000 years time, they're going to need to re-invent 21st Century digital technology *to our standards* before they'll be able to read it. They'll need to reverse engineer the file system, the IDE/SATA/Whatever interface then they'd need to build some sort of compatible OS... all that adds some pretty hefty entry requirements far more complex than decrypting the Rosetta Stone... so yes, our civilisation's data may be "preserved", but unless a civilisation at least as advanced follows (we're the only one that has existed so far in 200,000 years of our species existence and we'd only have stood a chance for about the last 20 years) a great deal of our knowledge, art and experiences might never be passed on. We could well become another "Dark Age".

Having said that though, we're not a civilisation confined to small fertile areas like a lot of our ancient ancestors; nothing as sprawling as 21st Century humanity has ever existed on this planet. If Stone Henge, Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat are still with us, I very much doubt some of the 20th and 21st Century's more robust buildings won't survive into the millennia. There'll probably even be the odd Banksy about.

Yeah but how important is that? Seriously? Those people weren't any more enlightened than us, heck all that remains of their 'civilizations' is, in essence, a bunch of glorified graffiti.

[rickyarbino]

Also, didn't we have to find the Rosetta stone before being able to decode anything left behind by the egyptians?

[Dystinkt]

Onwards though, the ones and zeros on my hard drive last perfectly well in the absence of electricity. So much so that I'd genuinely be horrified if I were to turn on my computer and find that all of the data stored on it had been destroyed by disconnection.

But they'd be unlikely to survive a change of civilisation, even if electricity was rediscovered. We can stumble across remnants of prehistoric civilisations and because what has been left behind is physical - paintings, buildings, tablets, pottery - we can instantly make inferences into their society and lifestyles. It's not really as simple with digitised data.

If our civilisation goes the way of Ancient Egypt and someone stumbles across a hard disk with surviving data in 2000 years time, they're going to need to re-invent 21st Century digital technology *to our standards* before they'll be able to read it. They'll need to reverse engineer the file system, the IDE/SATA/Whatever interface then they'd need to build some sort of compatible OS... all that adds some pretty hefty entry requirements far more complex than decrypting the Rosetta Stone... so yes, our civilisation's data may be "preserved", but unless a civilisation at least as advanced follows (we're the only one that has existed so far in 200,000 years of our species existence and we'd only have stood a chance for about the last 20 years) a great deal of our knowledge, art and experiences might never be passed on. We could well become another "Dark Age".

Having said that though, we're not a civilisation confined to small fertile areas like a lot of our ancient ancestors; nothing as sprawling as 21st Century humanity has ever existed on this planet. If Stone Henge, Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat are still with us, I very much doubt some of the 20th and 21st Century's more robust buildings won't survive into the millennia. There'll probably even be the odd Banksy about.

Yeah but how important is that? Seriously? Those people weren't any more enlightened than us, heck all that remains of their 'civilizations' is, in essence, a bunch of glorified graffiti.

Even with all of the modern technology at our disposal, nobody can work out definitively how the hell the Egyptians actually built the Pyramids with the methods they had available to them at the time, so I'd say we have an immense amount to learn from all this glorified graffiti

[nobody]

The pyramids were built by aliens so we could communicate with them.

[rickyarbino]

Even with all of the modern technology at our disposal, nobody can work out definitively how the hell the Egyptians actually built the Pyramids with the methods they had available to them at the time

That's the point.

[wysockisauce]

Even with all of the modern technology at our disposal, nobody can work out definitively how the hell the Egyptians actually built the Pyramids with the methods they had available to them at the time

That's the point.

Wasn't it slaves?

Stone too heavy? Add more slaves.
Can't reach the next step? Pile up some slaves.
Any problem can be solved with enough slaves.

Best form of data storage is encoding it into DNA and splicing it into a cockroach. Shit will last for millennia. I hear thats how the next Aphex Twin album is being released.

[dansci]

Even with all of the modern technology at our disposal, nobody can work out definitively how the hell the Egyptians actually built the Pyramids with the methods they had available to them at the time, so I'd say we have an immense amount to learn from all this glorified graffiti

A lot of people tend to believe that the pyramids were built in some short amount of time and are near perfect structures. I'm reality, the pyramids took decades to build, required entire cities to be built to support the operation, and many were flawed and destroyed.

Last time I checked, we actually do have a good ideal as to how the Egyptians built their pyramids. There are scrolls and tablets written by the engineers who helped make them.

[OGLemon]

interesting read
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4191

[sigbowls]

i think jewish giants built them

[AxeD]

Seriously fuck this.