Time To Kill
My new book will take place some 65,000 years into the future, which presents interesting complications as it pertains to data retention.
When I bought my first big hard drive, it was a physical one. 4 terabytes of storage on a Western Digital MyCloud. The enclosure was designed to stay on 24/7, connected to ethernet, allowing the files to be accessible from anywhere. If the primary drive failed, the secondary one would be accessible and, in theory, rebuild to a newer, replacement drive. Rinse, repeat. Theoretically this is a good way to keep your data locally accessible and “protected” long term, however this can be problematic. A standard RAID 1 backup solution (two of the same drives, mirroring each other) will come with two fresh hard drives. but after three years of use, both would have been running equally. So, if one drive dies, then the other isn’t that far behind it. (Rebuilding the contents of one drive to another can take hours, if not days.) By the time the drive theoretically finishes copying over, the surviving drive would have likely failed.
If data is so volatile, even with our technical achievements, how can it be reliably stored and propagated long term? Even an SSD, powered off, eventually degrades and becomes unusable after only a couple years. So then, how is history stored over, say, 65,000 years?
I’ve been reading Mary Beard’s SPQR for the last few days to help prep for my new project, and she very bleakly addresses the problem of dating Rome’s beginning with any accuracy. Comparative archeology techniques and radiocarbon dating only go so far, when the founding myth of Rome centers on two abandoned children getting breast-fed by a shewolf. The other problem is that the city has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that, to do any reliable historical reconstruction, requires literally digging down and hoping that something is there. Is the complete record of Rome’s founding, recorded on a vase or tablet conveniently hiding underneath the Trevi fountain? Well… better start digging!
It seems that the oldest information recoverable to humanity comes in the form of clay, cuneiform tablets. Therefore, would it be reasonable to develop a type of information storage that was completely physical, literally etched into a material with the same resilience of stone, but with the granularity of a CPU wafer?
I’ll think of something…
(Obviously I already have, but I don’t want to spoil it!)
***
This upcoming week is my mother’s belated 70th birthday celebration, where I will be traveling to the Great North (bay), which is rather close to my friend Greg’s neck of the woods. I’m planning on getting a jump start with the new book, or just completely succumbing to my depraved appetites at the Half-Price Books in Dublin, CA.
I may also finally be able to watch the He-man movie which, against all odds, was actually not terrible. Of course, I could wait until it streams, but something that big at least deserves a movie theater screen. Mortal Kombat II, also not too bad (apparently), just hit digital so I could be streaming that in my future as well… Honestly? I miss the fanfare of the early 90s moviegoing experience, but decade after decade of overcharging customers and front loading movies with almost 20 minutes of trailers has dimmed my opinion of the theater experience. Although I do miss the unintentional-deleted-scene that would pop up every so often after re-watching the movie later on DVD or Bluray. You always would have to go pee at some point and strategically “miss” part of the movie. Thankfully, I can just hit “pause” now.
