How The Loss Of A Great Library Shows Data’s Fragile State Today
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria and a possible Digital Dark Age
“A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents…Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.”
— Adrienne Bernhard, Shining A Light On The Digital Dark Age, The Long Now Foundation
Technology has given us power that our ancient ancestors might mistake for that of a deity. But it’s also made us arrogant. While we may rightly point to our achievements against childhood mortality, starvation, and our knowledge of flight, other areas are terribly lacking.
Namely, in data storage.
Now, this may cause you to tilt your head in surprise. And why wouldn’t it? You’re likely reading these words on a device with gigs of storage, not to mention your handy flash drive not far away. Perhaps you even have cloud backup. Inevitably, it’s all not as secure as you think.
According to data storage company Arcserve, electronic memory was first developed in 1947, and the first magnetic tapes in 1951. While digital may be magical and fast, durability isn’t its strong point.
Magnetic and cassette tapes last about thirty years.
Floppy disks, maybe ten to twenty if you’re lucky.
CDs and DVDs have shelf lives of five to twenty years.
Hard drives have three to five before degradation, and flash drives about the same time length.
There are also major issues between formats and migration.
Adrienne Bernhard in her article above also reminds us that many of Andy Warhol’s “doodles” on a Commodore Amiga computer are stuck there due to an archaic format. Not to mention millions of photos, songs, and videos were lost during a transfer of data from Myspace in 2019.
Now, let’s compare this to our less advanced ancestors.
Oracle bones have lasted for three thousand years. These are the first found examples of Chinese writing, etched on animal bones from the Sheng Dynasty between 1200 and 1050BC.
Some cuneiform tablets scratched in clay from the Assyrians are four thousand years old. The Library of Congress has examples of business receipts from 2100 BC. A tablet holding part of the Epic of Gilgamesh dates back thirty five hundred years.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep were first thought transcribed on papyrus in about 2400 BC. They were used as a tool for study and a method for scribes to learn to write. Moreover, you can still learn from them today.
So, apparently our primitive forbearers beat us into submission in the longevity department.
Yet they offer more lessons than this. One of the biggest is what happens when a repository of knowledge disappears, like in the case of the Library of Alexandria.
A Data Center For The Ancient World
While the idea of libraries was nothing new, Alexandria’s took on epic proportions. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains previously libraries were a local thing: “primarily concerned with the conservation of their own particular traditions and heritage.”
But the Library of Alexandria became a universal data hub, containing knowledge from across the known ancient world within its walls. Moreover, it functioned as a thinktank. The Greeks called it a “museum,” as in shrine of the Muses — where thought could be inspired.
After Alexander the Great’s death, his general Ptolemy Soter took over Egypt. He put a significant budget in the hands of a learned advisor and ordered him to collect all the world’s books in 295BC.
The following kings of the Ptolemaic line expanded the library. It contained the books of the Greek and Egyptian world, along with works about Babylonia, Buddhism, and Judaism. The speculation on its number of texts varies widely: anywhere from two hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand books in multiple buildings.
They varied on topics from “rhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science, and miscellaneous.” The books also furthered scholarship and study.
Its librarians and scholars included, Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the Earth in 200BC, Euclid the mathematician, and the engineer Archimedes.
The fate of the library is sketchy, although many stories have it consumed in fire. Others point to a slow and steady decline of patronage after Ptolemy VIII exiled all foreign scholars during a family struggle for power. The collapse of the dynasty after Rome invaded in 30BC didn’t help either.
Regardless, at some point, much of this vast collection of knowledge either disappeared or burned. No telling how much was lost. Moreover, this devastating data failure has some parallels in our modern world.
The Destruction Of Our Digital Library
“The looming threat of the so-called “Digital Dark Age”, accelerated by the extraordinary growth of an invisible commodity — data — suggests we have fallen from a golden age of preservation in which everything of value was saved.”
— Adrienne Bernhard, Shining A Light On The Digital Dark Age, The Long Now Foundation
Bernhard explains we may soon encounter our own Alexandria moment where there’s a destruction or slow steady decline of data. Ours comes in three flavors:
Longevity: addressed earlier in comparing digital shelf life to ancient formats
Format Accessibility: hardware no longer intermingles with current tech due to continuous and quick changes
Comprehensibility: file types can’t be read by newer programs
There’s also another major problem: our incredible accumulation of data. Where Alexandria added another building, our scrolls are innumerable, and require consistent power to maintain.
In 2010, it’s estimated two zettabytes (two trillion gigs) of data was generated, consumed, and copied. By 2025 one hundred eighty-one zettabytes are expected. This will lead data collectors to “appraise” what should and shouldn’t be saved due to physical data limits.
This also doesn’t include “link rot,” where digital links breakdown from atrophy of web locations. But the Long Now Foundation has some ideas.
Maintaining Our Library Of Alexandria
The Long Now Foundation is an organization focused on prompting humanity to think beyond the short-term to much longer horizons. A recent project involved creating a clock which can last ten thousand years.
They’ve also applied this thinking to data. It drove them to create what they call the Rosetta Project. According to Bernhard, it’s an effort to “build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages that would be readable to an audience 10,000 years hence.” Its result is the Rosetta Disk.
According to The Long Now Foundation (TLNF):
“The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel…Each page is only 400 microns across — about the width of 5 human hairs — and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X.”
It also functions like the Rosetta stone, so if the reader can understand one of the fifteen hundred languages, the entire library could be deciphered. But TLNF doesn’t claim this to be a solution. It’s only a gateway to one.
Bernhard also talks about Microsoft’s Project Silica. This stores data on quartz glass, which isn’t affected by electromagnetic fields, may last tens of thousands of years, and is also cheap. They describe it as WORM (Write Once Read Many), and claim:
“Silica offers volumetric data densities higher than current magnetic tapes (raw capacity upwards of 7TB in a square glass platter the size of a DVD), and using beam steering of the laser beam, we’re able to achieve system-level aggregate write throughputs comparable to current archival systems.”
Bernhard also mentions the nonprofit the Internet Archive, whose program The Way Back Machine, you may have used at some point to fix broken links. This archive holds over seven hundred billion web pages, forty-one million books, and almost fifteen million audio recordings, not to mention millions of videos and images.
TLNF believes it will take a coordinated effort between governments, libraries, research foundations, and private companies to prevent our digital Library of Alexandria from dissolving from time or disaster.
Ultimately, clay, bone, and papyrus have outdone our current digital storage media, which means we must do better. Knowledge is only effective if you can pass it on. As an ancient library shows us, data is fragile and requires protection.
-Originally posted on Medium 9/5/23