[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> By accident or by some other reason, we have much better optics than
> computers. So, it is reasonably to suppose that some future
> civilization will achieve much faster good optics than good computers.

Okay, great.  Now you can assign probabilities to my other six
assumptions, and multiply all the resulting seven probabilities
together.  Feel free to tell us the results.  If the product of those
seven is more than a small fraction of a percent, I'm going to say you
were being wildly unrealistic.  Even if you assign each of the seven a
50% probability, their product will be less than 1%.

Actually, there are more assumptions: you have to assume that humanity
*ever* recovers, and within a period of time when people will still
understand written English.  You'd have to calibrate the magnitude of
a catastrophe *very* carefully to get a situation where civilization
collapses, to the extent that none of the hundreds of millions of
computers on the planet remains functional for long enough to print
out any needed info (even using wood/biomass-powered backup
generators, or emergency fuel supplies) . . . but you still have
people who can read English around.  People are more fragile than
computers, and not much more numerous.

Yeah, I'm still going to say the entire idea is ridiculous.