> All data degrades and eventually disappears unless an effort is made to care for and maintain it.
This is the crux of it. You can have your holographic quartz or whatever new technology is supposed to last a hundred million years, but unless someone is keeping it from being thrown away after your family has a yard sale after you die, it's gone. Getting people to care about your data is the hardest thing required to make data last forever.
And even if they do care you have to also preserve the system used to read it. Even if your papyrus survives if no one knows your language it doesn’t matter.
A blockchain funded by data contributors is an interesting idea.
If fees for adding data were continually adjusted to keep data size to an economically viable size.
I.e. there would be a continual auction of adding data, with the fees spread out among verifiably maintained repositories (say fastest generation of hash across all data from previous hash, every minute.)
And each repository could compete by price to service data requests.
The point being: long term distributed incentive to maintain and serve data.
(Scaling to vast amounts of data vs. sharding - allowing individual repositories to hold partial data - balanced to ensure distributed backups, but not more than necessary to keep each archive size manageable for many providers.)
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Best done without creating any new coin type. I.e. avoid creating any non-aligned hype incentives.
Maybe this has already been done?
I’m no expert, but I know chia network [0] is a crypto based on proving you have data stored. Not sure how popular or properly incentivised it is but could be a solution like you’ve described.
True, but data will be aggregated to train generative AIs. If those systems prevail, then the original data will live in spirit.
Maybe that will be the ultimate destination of all data: To train AIs.
In the future, data creators should be compensated for their contributions to build AIs.
Somehow "No Data Lasts Forever" sounds profound while "Nothing Lasts Forever" sound obvious. Why is that?
It doesn't sound profound at all?
Exactly
This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
Knowledge gets lost constantly, there is just so much of it that it happens on the sidelines. Just think about all the old software and hardware stacks which have been replaced and the people who were experts in it are now retired and dead.
Even the knowledge of today is not well-preserved. If Stack Overflow were to disappear tomorrow, how many other resources would there be for all the programming knowledge? There aren't that many great programming books. Thank god Github has been archived in the Arctic Code Vault. It could all be lost in a few decades.
Even cultural significant things like how to produce Saturn's F-1 Rocket Engine gets lost. The manufacturing processes, machining techniques, and supplier expertise is gone and wasn't written down. That was just ~60 years ago. The recipe for Fogbank, a material for nuclear warheads, was lost, and it took 5 years to reverse engineer it.
It is not clear to me how this refutes the article. Can you explain a bit more? Do you have an example of a piece of data that lasts forever by virtue of these facts?
How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
FTL travel. Alternatively, just displace the universe into a larger, younger universe. Easy peasy lemon squeezy ;p
Plenty of knowledge has been lost. Can you read Linear A?