[onlooker]

This is a very good thread and discussion. If a technological society does make it through the bottleneck of consequences it will have been because they had incorporated these durable resilient and energy/resource saving technologies. So a very good trend

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dolanbaker', 'A')ccording to this link it's a type of long lasting DVD
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/9 ... 1000-years
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut what if you had a backup medium that was nigh indestructible, almost immune to inclement conditions, and made of stone? You’d have the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids. The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time. M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dolanbaker', 'A')ccording to this link it's a type of long lasting DVD
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/9 ... 1000-years
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut what if you had a backup medium that was nigh indestructible, almost immune to inclement conditions, and made of stone? You’d have the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids. The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time. M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

[Tanada]

Okay it is later. Complexity plus energy results in greater complexity. One of the problems with data storage and retrieval in the event we lose complexity from even a moderate power down is pretty basic. Back 40 or more years ago there was a technique for data storage invented called micro-dot storage. In essence a picture was taken of a page including both text and illustrations or photos. Then that picture was reduced in size while still being crisply focused until the resulting image was less than a millimeter in any physical dimension. To read a microdot document you would place the acetate page about the size of a standard 8"/11" paper page into a reading device and it would in essence focus in on the micro-dot with a microscope style lens arrangement and project the image on a large screen for viewing. The great thing about microdots was you could transfer the high fidelity images down onto any transparent material including glass, Lucite, or even plexiglass plastic that would be highly durable compared to paper or other storage media and they were compact. A typical book could be transposed to a single page sized glass plate and by sandwiching the etched surface with another sheet of glass you can create a highly durable media form that can be accessed with a minimal technology level with a microscope viewer and fine controls to properly align the micro-dot image. In the worst case scenario you simply need a light source, a magnifying glass, and a clear blank surface to display the magnified image upon to be able to view the stored image.

Midro-dot storage is the ultimate in analog compact storage and allows simple devices to access those images. This retrieval level of complexity is easily achievable with a not too advanced agricultural base supporting lens grinding for magnification, something achieved OTL in the 1620's.

Now compare microdot storage media with digital media storage. It doesn't really matter what the digital media is, say a blue ray type retrieval system made of very durable material that will not decay over say a thousand years. The question is, once you have your media stored digitally what level of complexity must you retain to access that stored information? Well for the blue ray example you need a highly precise spin rate player that uses an intense monochromatic light source aka laser to decompile long lists of 1's and 0's and then interpret what the combinations of those bits of data mean. Digital data storage also goes back to early computing, however to interpret digital data sets you need to be able to preform a massive number of calculations very quickly, or you need to be very very patient. Yes you can digitally store images and text in a very compact form, with a modern laptop computer you can likely store the entire Library of Congress with its many thousands of volumes of printed text, images and art work on the hard drive. But if the hard drive glitches out or the battery dies you have no way of retrieving that information. It is as inaccessible to you as if it had never existed in the first place.

This is the fundamental difference between digital and analog media. An analog source is not as tightly compact, but it remains accessible with minimal technology and even duplicate-able with a relatively low level of technology.

Take two descendant cultures, one where everything was stored digitally and another where a lot of information was archived in analog format. (Insert existential threat here) wham the culture is dropped all the way back to people grubbing a living on small farms while the local warlord collects 'taxes' in the form of surplus crops to feed his enforcers and prevent the neighboring warlords from taking over his territory. Now let 200 years of extreme warlord level tribalism pass and everyone who worked with computers be long dead of old age in their island hideouts.

Two nation states eventually assert themselves lets call them Green and Orange. Green has found an archive in a deep vault under the abandoned nearby city that contains a thousand Blue-Ray style digital memory disks made of highly durable gorilla glass. In the vault are banks of computers all set to read the disks with start up and operating instructions printed on the sides of the computer. Orange has found a library in a cave where some fanatical prepper stored the library of Congress on gorilla glass sheets as micro-dots and even included a very simple mechanical projector-reader that is set to the book telling how to make projector-readers.

Do you think Green or Orange will be more successful in accessing the treasure trove of knowledge stored in their area of control? Presume that no Luddite fanatic rises to authority and order the archives destroyed instead of accessed. Go even further and say the computer retrieval system in Greens vault was programmed like the iPhones given to children to keep them entertained, it has very simple intuitive software that can teach an operator how to retrieve the information it has stored.

Ooops, there is no grid. Ooops again the emergency back up solar charging system has aged to the point where it only generates a tiny fraction of its original capacity and the battery storage system has decayed into uselessness. The antecedents of Green thought the crisis would be brief and shallow and that the vault would be accessed withing weeks or months and maintained by the holders using the knowledge stored in it.

The preppers who created the Orange archive in the cave were hopeless pessimists who though civilization might take a millennia to reassert itself. After all when the Western Roman Empire fell apart in the 400's AD it wasn't until the 1800's that London grew to the size of Ancient Rome and provided the same kind of complexity to the leaders of the British Empire. The Preppers thought long term and simple.

Sure if Greens ancestors had managed to hold onto the level of complexity needed to maintain digital storage and retrieval systems they could have remained the only technologically advanced culture after the disaster knocked everyone down at once.

This is ultimately the cost of complexity, if you make it too complex for people to maintain and duplicate you turn it into a dead end technology that slowly or otherwise fails as less and less descendants understand how and why they should dedicate so much time to learning about it and maintaining it.

Say the Green ancestors had been successful in the sense that their descendants found their vault earlier, when the batteries were still working to a capacity that would run everything for a few hours a night after a full day charging from the solar PV system. Remember these people have passed through a collapse/bottleneck and 95% or them are simple farmers feeding the 5% who are the military, police, and artisans that live in the ruins. Great, the Green dreamers succeeded their descendants can access all of human stored knowledge and they have the computer program that teaches them how to do it.

Now what? Well the authority figures, whether political or religious, take control of the archive as step one. Step two they discover the entertainment files in the retrieval system, including literature, TV and movies. The authority figures see epic war movies like Braveheart and documentaries about the Crusades. Eventually they see documentaries or movies about Napoleon and his campaign to conquer Europe, and want those weapons for themselves so they can dominate their neighbors. They are reminded of how east it is to make black powder and look up instructions for things like simple explosive grenades that their blacksmiths can build from available materials. They win the war and conquer the neighbors. Hurrah! Now what?

The Green authorities control all the territory they have reasonable access to because of the war fighting secrets they learned from the digital archive. Clearly the knowledge here is dangerous so it must be kept from the peasants, after all if they saw most of the entertainments they would think they deserved a better life than nameless drudgery growing crops. No, the Archivist specialists must be formed as a new profession to guard and control the knowledge the ancestors left (for such is the pattern of human cultures).

Over time they learn other techniques they can use to make the leaders of the Green culture more comfortable, things like the Roman imperial bath house system where fire under a masonry floor was used to heat saunas and pools with complex architecture but simple technology. Over time the batteries hold less and less of a charge and the computers work for fewer hours each night. Eventually the batteries and solar PV are not enough to keep the system working. This is what I consider the best case scenario, a less good case but more likely scenario would be the entertainments are discovered and the authorities use up the power every night watching old movies on the monitors until battery charge fails and not much useful knowledge is transmitted to the descendant generation.

After all what says luxurious living to an agricultural society leader more than watching Murder On The Orient Express while your peasants and slaves are huddled in their shacks eating gruel? Sure there is a lot of gruel in your diet too, but you get to watch classic movies and see the wonders of the past and they do not, and you can share these with your privileged upper advisors and generals to remind them serving you comes with perks...

[KaiserJeep]

Tanada, I do appreciate all the effort that you put into that, which obviously was considerable. But I would like to reiterate my prior statements and expand upon them.

Firstly, technology has marched beyond the need to own media, particularly rotating media such as hard disks or DVDs or Blue Rays or those "big old black CDs", as my kid once referred to my precious collection of analog LPs. We don't need disks because solid state disks - SSD's - have replaced them. I did a technology refresh at our house for Christmas, and niether the iPad I got the wife nor the Android tablet she got me have hard drives or disk players or burners. They have SSD's as does the PC I am configuring for the new Nantucket house. The PC I am typing these words on is an old Windows 7 unit, totally obsolete, and almost certainly the last I own to even have a hard drive or DVD burner. The new PC is based upon a NUC (Intel's Next Unit of Computing):

...which will end up attached to the rear VESA mount holes on an existing widescreen LCD monitor I own, talking to a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. It will have no fan or hard disk or disk player/burner, because it does not need any. Totally silent, no visible wires, just some open USB 2/3 ports and 250GB of onboard SSD storage (I can't buy anything smaller, that's 4X as large as I actually need). Think of it as an upgradeable Intel i7 all-in-one, costing less than $500.

Similarly, streaming services have eliminated the need for DVDs and BlueRays, and even there, silent PCBs stuffed with SSD storage have eliminated disk farms. These are arranged in RAID arrays (of solid state drives with no moving parts) which are both fault tolerant and online repairable.

It's not your internet anymore, or even your kids. As the technology rolls over the current obsolete computers, the internet infrastructure and the mobile devices are both being replaced with units two orders of magnitude more reliable - and in the case of the infrastructure, fault tolerant and online serviceable. In case you are wondering, the internet is also being hardened with geograpically distributed backup sites, to prevent outages from earthquakes, EMPs, and hurricanes and other minor annoyances.

Two years back I bought the entire collection of PDF National Geographic on DVDs. Truthfully, I was annoyed that I could not get it on a thumb drive - but that was not an available option. I copied the files onto my server and put the disks into a safe.

My point would be that as the internet pervades the world, it is becoming hardened, ever-present, and using fewer and fewer resources and already, current generation webservers use less than 1% of the power as older ones, and are 1000X as reliable (at least the hardware is). The primary threat today is hacking as with our last PO outage.

Come the Peak Oil power down or the nuclear warfare apocalypse, I expect the WWW will persist and even grow as those events happen. Minor annoyances those would be, in the evolution of the new cyber humans. No need for hardened media - or any media, or books.

The next humans will not even have to know how to read, as they will have direct access to the sum of human knowledge:


The internet is here. It's not going away. Soon it will be inside your head. (If not you, at least your Grandkids.)

[Newfie]

I side more with Tanada, presuming the fall is deep and long. With all our current technology we have great trouble reading the old languages. They are written in stone, we can see the figures, we can not decipher.

You need a certain level of complexity to read the complex messages. A simple agricultural society, even if they could see the images, or hear the voice, would likely not be able able to understand the words or concepts.

If the fall is not so deep then the technological solutions have merit.

[GHung]

.... and I fall somewhere between Tanada and KJ. Tanada suggested;

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;....but more likely scenario would be the entertainments are discovered and the authorities use up the power every night watching old movies on the monitors until battery charge fails and not much useful knowledge is transmitted to the descendant generation."

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I') side more with Tanada, presuming the fall is deep and long. With all our current technology we have great trouble reading the old languages. They are written in stone, we can see the figures, we can not decipher.

You need a certain level of complexity to read the complex messages. A simple agricultural society, even if they could see the images, or hear the voice, would likely not be able able to understand the words or concepts.

If the fall is not so deep then the technological solutions have merit.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('baha', 'D')udes, if we can just make it a few more years we can have that Holographic lady in the long gown to magically appear and teach us what we need to know. She's cute too

Imagine what a hunter/gatherer would think of that!

[evilgenius]

Retrieval of information is not the problem. The problem is participation. Complexity means that it becomes impossible for a single person to know everything. They can build a very complex personal structure, but it can't contain everything that the sort of complexity this thread is talking about involves. Eventually, everyone has to delegate things to specialists.

What's going on is that even one person's great personal structure requires that they manage it all along, coming to that point where they discover what and where to delegate. As a society of individuals we delegate to managed entities. Information isn't just stored there, it is managed in the same way that individuals manage what goes into understanding previous to delegation. That's where your highway department comes from, or your social services department. The trouble is that these entities can't really be left to their own devices. They will always be subject to politics. Without participation these entities become subject to somebody else's management philosophy. People today want to enjoy without participating. That creates tension between what we would like and what is. Rather than paying the cost of living in complexity, paying attention and participating such that our opinions about how best to manage what has been delegated to others are heard, we would rather complain.

I think it's popular to assume that markets can handle this kind of thing for us. We would like to think that we can address this issue economically. To a degree we can, but because management is complex the arbitrage of situations that appear have to be hashed out through political involvement. Markets are too simple to cross between the various positions, as they are not interchangeable.

[onlooker]

Good points Evil. And ultimately markets and all economics and social questions boil down to the internal politics of decision making. One pattern consistently emerges though. That is that centrally based systems of any kind are or become hierarchic structures. While decentralized ones can offer wider access to decision making and participation. Presumably technology of any kind can connect people more but also allow for a centralized command and control matrix. What pertinence these issues and questions have going forward remains to be seen

[Newfie]

Yes Evil, nice post.

[KaiserJeep]

Would anyone care to speculate what it would be like or what would be possible when multiple human minds contain a sizeable subset - or all - human knowledge and are interconnected via a network? Perhaps this gestalt of multiple humans and machines is the species that replaces Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Far from them replacing us, I believe we will hybridize with computers and datastores, with the result being more than the sum of the individual pieces.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'W')ould anyone care to speculate what it would be like or what would be possible when multiple human minds contain a sizeable subset - or all - human knowledge and are interconnected via a network? Perhaps this gestalt of multiple humans and machines is the species that replaces Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Far from them replacing us, I believe we will hybridize with computers and datastores, with the result being more than the sum of the individual pieces.

[onlooker]

We do not need some artificial machine like network to integrate us and facilitate our evolution. We need to revive ancient spiritual beliefs that manifested reverence for the natural world, a recognition of how we are all part of creation and thus united in a profound way and a sense of humility and awe

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'W')e do not need some artificial machine like network to integrate us and facilitate our evolution. We need to revive ancient spiritual beliefs that manifested reverence for the natural world, a recognition of how we are all part of creation and thus united in a profound way and a sense of humility and awe

[Newfie]

What would happen is the network would amplify the human irrational self.

Genghas Khan on steroids.

[KaiserJeep]

These people are already networked. We are communicating on that network because we are part of it too. There is only one difference between having wires in your brain and today. That would be your thumbs are no longer needed to communicate using a phone, nor a keyboard when you sit in front of a classic PC.

The difference is that the direct brain-to-brain is quicker, more effective, and connects you to more people. It is a difference of degree only.