Hard drives don’t last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.
Suppose that, for one reason or another, that the people preserving said information died 500 years ago, and nobody alive understands how our current technology works. Should future civilizations’ understanding of Pompeii be entirely reliant on a bunch of degraded old hard drives, or should they have a variety of options to learn what happened?
Oh boy, let me tell you about this new thing we just discovered called “backups.” Or this other thing we have called the “printing press.”
You see, it’s possible to print 1,000,000+ copies of a book on Pompeii and digitize it, and then back up that digital file on 1,000,000+ hdd/ssds.
To erase all of that, you’d need every copy of that book to be destroyed in many fires and solar flares or EMPs to knock out all technology ever. It is theoretically possible, sure, but it isn’t like the only copy of the only book on Pompeii and also the only hdd containing copies are kept in the Library of Alexandria.
Hard drives don’t last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.
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Suppose that, for one reason or another, that the people preserving said information died 500 years ago, and nobody alive understands how our current technology works. Should future civilizations’ understanding of Pompeii be entirely reliant on a bunch of degraded old hard drives, or should they have a variety of options to learn what happened?
deleted by creator
Oh boy, let me tell you about this new thing we just discovered called “backups.” Or this other thing we have called the “printing press.”
You see, it’s possible to print 1,000,000+ copies of a book on Pompeii and digitize it, and then back up that digital file on 1,000,000+ hdd/ssds.
To erase all of that, you’d need every copy of that book to be destroyed in many fires and solar flares or EMPs to knock out all technology ever. It is theoretically possible, sure, but it isn’t like the only copy of the only book on Pompeii and also the only hdd containing copies are kept in the Library of Alexandria.