Problem: how to safely preserve data and knowledge in digital format?

[Ilie Pandia]

A brief introduction.

Before the Internet (or digital) era the information was being stored in libraries as books, newspapers and various historical documents or accounts. (Some of those were stored on film to save space and preserve them better).

While searching for something (and generally accessing the information) in such a format is very cumbersome, because you have do to it manually (or ask someone who knows to tell you where to look), this kind of format has some definite advantages:

- it lasts longer in time (than a hard drive, and even CD)
- it is hard to change/fake the old information
- there are ways to check a source's authenticity by looking at the "age" of the storage material: paper, film and so on.

The digital format is very easy to access and to search, and computer aided searches have come a very long way. Data is easy and cheap to store! You can have an entire library in your pocket if you wish.

The problem.

The information in digital format can be easily altered (and virtually rewriting history) and that is a danger in itself, that most are not aware of. But the other danger more closely related to this post is that digitally stored data can easily be "lost!" forever!

If you store it online you can loose access to it by either being actively denied access by some agency, or simply by a server failure (I know about redundancy, but bare with me, I am getting somewhere). If you store it locally, I personally know of no way to store it safely for say 5 to 10 years! Technology is designed to break down in a few years so you are forced to buy new stuff. So I seriously doubt you can rely on hard drives or memory sticks. The way we store information today is a disaster waiting to happen...

Increased solar activity is to be expected in the following years (or even months), as you can see in some threads here on Avalon, and that will pose a major challenge to digital data storage and accessing it. Your online storage will most likely become useless so you are left with local storage that needs to be properly shielded and you need some kind of working device to read that data! A working computer or laptop that has a power source and was not damaged by any solar activity.

To me this looks very very serious! Our entire documented history and written knowledge may be lost to us! Save for a few servers that governments will protect, but then they will become the one and only source for historical truth! And they may choose or not to grant access to that information.

So this is a serious question: how do we, as a people, preserve our history, our knowledge and data, from being destroyed, or centralized in the hands of very few that will be able to alter it or grant access to as they see fit?

Sometimes when I think about this I feel the urge to start printing books, but that's not a viable solution... not for me anyway.

There is also a mystical aspect to this. Namely, do we really need written data to store our knowledge, or can we unlock an ability to memorize and then recall everything we need, and even inter-connect in some sort of telepathic internet. I am putting this here because I thought of it, but at this time I lack such an ability, so again, not an option for me.

[Maia Gabrial]

I also noticed that when I save anything on a flash drive and Windows is upgraded that I have to download a software (free, of course) to access my stuff.... And here I thought my stuff was safe.... What a world, what a world....

[ThePythonicCow]

So this is a serious question: how do we, as a people, preserve our history, our knowledge and data, from being destroyed, or centralized in the hands of very few that will be able to alter it or grant access to as they see fit?
What's worked for me for the past 25 years or so is a two phase process:

Keep everything on my main disk, and
Keep multiple backups of that disk.

Granted, 25 years is not very long in the grand scheme of things :).

This strategy has worked by taking advantage of the continual increase in the size of disks. I've had disks ranging in size from 5 Megabytes to 2 Terabytes.

Every year or two, I copy everything I have to a bigger disk, and gain more room for more stuff. This has worked across systems running DOS 3.0 up through Ubuntu 12.04. That way everything I want to save (and a bunch of stuff not worth saving that I'm too lazy to sort through) is available, on currently working media.

Then I back things up ... as you know better than anyone else here, Ilie, I'm obsessive-compulsive in my backups.

[kingmonkey]

Whilst i am a huge advocate of the digital age and the democratising and equalising effect the free flow of information that the internet allows, increasingly everything is being uploaded digitally. Everything. We are moving towards a cloud based ownership of all media and mediums. If we continue at the pace we are at then physicality will have no relevance.

I think in a thread that i started someone called it a modern day book burning.

If the dangers of emp storms are real, then we are in for a rough ride. Worst case scenario, cultures and histories and everything else could possibly be wiped out.

Yeah possible alarmist but historically civilisations and cultures have been lost forever.

If someone is going to the trouble of saving the worlds seeds and storing them in the side of a mountain, i hope someone is saving some books.

[kingmonkey]

But then again maybe we long overdue a reboot here on earth.

[4evrneo]

Thank you Ilie,
I have actually been wondering the same things lately. I have droves of links and files on my computer of things learned in the past couple years and 3 or 4 flash drives full, and if the internet or the grid goes down, what do we do?
Many of the things saved are how to's on gardening, edible plants & survival type things. As much as I wish I could, I have terrible memory capabilities and that option is out. (for now)
Being that I am not too technically inclined, this is something I should figure out and soon.

[sandy]

May have to go back to etching on rocks :)

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

In the Fahrenheit 451 there was a problem of permanent data loss. Whell you know firemen burned books that were unfit for "the system". People divided themselves into groups and memrized particular titles by heart.... They aquired new names after books titles...

We could backup compressed versions of information as hexadecimal numbers coresponding with byte values on long human readable reels of tape. Plastic or waxed paper. To waterproof it.

As for the data backups. Have read once that there is the dark side of the backups. They are not always willing to restore properly :( Most of the time yes. For this reason we should check from time to time if our backups are restorable... The article i've read reported that most of companies/users do backups put them in safe storage but never checks if that backup is restoring corectly...

[WyoSeeker]

Good question. I'll answer it from a network engineer perspective.

First rule is redundancy is your friend. Every electronic device will fail at some point. Backups are your only way to immortalize your data.

The steps are this:

Identify your important data. This can be hard because it can be scattered unless you have been careful about keeping your email data store, checkbook data file and all documents and data files in one location. On Windows machines you at least want the entire user profile.

Back that data up regularly. Ask yourself if you lost everything would you sigh or cry? If the answer is cry it's time to backup again. This can often be scheduled or automated.

Make a lot of copies and store them in a lot of places to protect against natural disasters. Rotate stored backups to keep all copies fresh. Make sure you are using media and backup tools you can restore from if you have to buy a brand new system.

For EMP protection you could write backups to DVD disks. Optical media won't be affected and the DVD standard should stand up for a number of years.

I wrapped a laptop in a plastic bag, then wrapped it in tin foil, then sealed it in another plastic bag to create a farraday cage.

[norman]

May have to go back to etching on rocks :)

You said it first. I was scanning down the thread to see what others had said before I replied.

Yes, I see a lot of sense and wisdom in the ancient's practice of making huge solid structures with their knowledge encoded into the designs.


As a less permanent measure, I'm currently recording quite a lot of audio stuff ( documentaries, favourite music etc ) onto cassette tape. Yes I know cassette machines won't last for ever but I'm not doing it to last any longer than I will.

I'm quite certain that audio recorded on tape will survive an X class solar flare or an EMP burst a lot better than my cupboard full of external hard drives will. Even if the machines that play the tapes are snuffed out by the events, they can be rebuilt and the tapes made audible again. A hard drive ( or it's controller board ) would be almost impossible to recover anything from.

[TargeT]

So this is a serious question: how do we, as a people, preserve our history, our knowledge and data, from being destroyed, or centralized in the hands of very few that will be able to alter it or grant access to as they see fit?
What's worked for me for the past 25 years or so is a two phase process:

Keep everything on my main disk, and
Keep multiple backups of that disk.

Granted, 25 years is not very long in the grand scheme of things :).

This strategy has worked by taking advantage of the continual increase in the size of disks. I've had disks ranging in size from 5 Megabytes to 2 Terabytes.

Every year or two, I copy everything I have to a bigger disk, and gain more room for more stuff. This has worked across systems running DOS 3.0 up through Ubuntu 12.04. That way everything I want to save (and a bunch of stuff not worth saving that I'm too lazy to sort through) is available, on currently working media.

Then I back things up ... as you know better than anyone else here, Ilie, I'm obsessive-compulsive in my backups.

are we talking archival? I assume so as "saving history" doesn't mean you want to keep something so you can read it in 10 years, it sounds more like you want future generations to know something...

what as worked in the past? Monolithic structures certainly,, carefully preserved mediums like paper, clay or metal..

I would suggest burnt DVD's and a hermetically sealed safe to hold them, disks and "flash drives" are more prone to failure over time than "scratches" in a surface (aka dvd's / CD's).... or a monolithic structure ;)

[ThePythonicCow]

are we talking archival? I assume so as "saving history" doesn't mean you want to keep something so you can read it in 10 years, it sounds more like you want future generations to know something...

what as worked in the past? Monolithic structures certainly,, carefully preserved mediums like paper, clay or metal..

I would suggest burnt DVD's and a hermetically sealed safe to hold them, disks and "flash drives" are more prone to failure over time than "scratches" in a surface (aka dvd's / CD's).... or a monolithic structure ;)

CD's and DVD's aren't "scratches" on a surface ... they are chemical reactions. As best as I recall, the archival life of CD's and DVD's typically varies in the range of about 2 to 15 years, depending on material.

The biggest problem that my above tactic has solved over the last 25 years is that no device and no medium, able to hold large ("large" being a rapidly changing value) amounts of data economically, has remained usable for 25 years. All my old hard drives, floppy drives, tape drives, floppy disks, tape cartridges, punch cards, paper tapes, ... ceased being practically useful after a point. So long as I have -all- the data I expect to preserve on my current main hard disk, then I know the device and media I depend on to access it still works. Then I just have to keep backing the sucker up (and knowing my backups work.)

A couple of other problems with CD's and DVD's: they don't hold much, and they aren't much cheaper than hard drives. I could get 100 4.7 GByte DVD's for about $25, which works out to about 5.3 cents/Gbyte. I can get a 1 Terabyte hard drive for about $70, which works out to 7.0 cents/Gbyte. It would take 212 of those DVD's to hold the same data as on a single 1 Terabyte hard drive, for a cost of $53 for just the media (DVD's). I'd much sooner use one $70 hard drive than 212 DVD's for $53. Even given that a $70 one Terabyte hard drive is the slowest model available, it's still way way faster and more convenient than 212 DVD's.

(In somewhat related news, Sony announced last month that it is closing its DVD business: Sony Says Goodbye to Making CD, DVD, Blu-ray Optical Disc Drives (http://blog.cd-info.com/2012/09/sony-says-goodbye-to-making-cd-dvd-blu-ray-optical-discs/).)

We do not have a good archival option for computer data. We never have. The first change in this status that I've ever heard of was announced two weeks ago: Quartz Glass is Hitachi’s 100 Million Year Data Storage (http://blog.cd-info.com/2012/10/quartz-glass-is-hitachis-100-million-year-data-storage/). Hitachi hopes to have this to market in about 2015 ... so hang on just a little longer :).

[ThePythonicCow]

CD's and DVD's aren't "scratches" on a surface ... they are chemical reactions. As best as I recall, the archival life of CD's and DVD's typically varies in the range of about 2 to 15 years, depending on material.
Correction - here's some DVD media claiming to be good for 100 years: Verbatim UltraLife™ Gold Archival Grade DVD-R (http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/dvd/archival-grade-gold-dvd-r/). Purchasing 100 of them would cost about $160, or about $340 for one Terabyte.

[TargeT]

well, a little googling and now I understand how CD/s DVD's work... I need to read my signature more often I think... (Question everything, always) haha...

sounds like we are back to Monolithic structures.... ( a lot of good those did us though right? we are still pretty clueles on all fronts)

[Ilie Pandia]

Ok, backing your data is always a good idea, and one could argue that is a must!

However my concern was not really only for my life time or personal use. That was not the thinking behind public libraries :).

My concern is how to create something like the Wikipedia that:
- will survive at least the challenges we expect
- will contain not as much personal data but rather important information and research as currently developed by the human collective
- will continue to be easily and freely accessible to anyone who cares to use it

[TargeT]

Ok, backing your data is always a good idea, and one could argue that is a must!

However my concern was not really only for my life time or personal use. That was not the thinking behind public libraries :).

My concern is how to create something like the Wikipedia that:
1- will survive at least the challenges we expect
2- will contain not as much personal data but rather important information and research as currently developed by the human collective
3- will continue to be easily and freely accessible to anyone who cares to use it

1-- a challenge in itself, especially since the "we expect" could be a very very wide list of events.


2-- Another challenge, who decides what is important, how do you sift through the enormous pile of lies and falsehoods (and theories based on top of those; for instance, a lot of people would demand that E=MC^2 be included, I'm very certain that it's completely wrong)


3-- the greatest challenge, mostly due to the lack of definition of 1 and 2, those definitely need to be answered first, but the easily and freely accessible will be very difficult as well... altruistic idea's have amazing sources, but I think they are often met by disheartening challenges.

[Ilie Pandia]

I understand your point TargeT. But we may get lost into trying to define 1 and 2 and never actually save anything.

Arguably all the information and knowledge we have now will prove to be false in the future when new understanding will come.

But we could prioritize the current information as we have it now into:

- survival
- something to survive for like various forms of art (this is pretty important for without it there is not point in surviving)

The criteria will still be very subjective and even the huge libraries today do not have every book that was ever printed, but they do cover a vast range of stuff.

[araucaria]

On the subject of libraries, if they were really serious about creating CO2 sinks, they would be building national libraries in every province since books are the most useful format for storing carbon.

As regards recording technology, the next step would seem to be the Akashic records, the question being how do we get there from here?

Concerning CMEs and other such events, we need to understand better how human activity is responsible for solar activity and learn to focus our intentions on producing a peacefule earth and thereby a peaceful sun. In other words the best way of coping with a solar flare is to avoid having it happen in the first place. Some work in this direction is currently underway on the Here & Now thread :)

[ThePythonicCow]

My concern is how to create something like the Wikipedia that:
- will survive at least the challenges we expect
- will contain not as much personal data but rather important information and research as currently developed by the human collective
- will continue to be easily and freely accessible to anyone who cares to use it

It may be difficult to insure that our data is always well indexed and widely available, on a continuing and ongoing basis, by well known and centralized facilities, because such resources become "high value targets" for takeover (as has happened to Wikipedia) or destruction.

But widely distributed and dispersed information, in the hands of many people, geographically dispersed, and in various formats, will be exceedingly difficult to erase from the memory of our human civilization.

That may well be the single biggest change, the biggest difference, between now and previous times in human history when civilization and its technology has reached a high point, that being how widespread is much of the essential information of a high civilization. The introduction of the printing press into Europe had a similar affect, on a more limited scale, as it dispersed much of the information from monopolistic control of the priests, royalty and their scribes, to the a wide variety of people.

I would only suggest that each of us think about the information we have accumulated that might be useful to others, and have that information stored in a couple of ways. Perhaps make a local copy of information in the cloud, or keep backups, or write it to DVD's, or print it out ...

Rather than having a single Library of Alexandria (http://ehistory.osu.edu/world/articles/articleview.cfm?aid=9), we should have a million small and partial libraries, integrated and shared via the Web where possible, but even when that's not reliable, known to the ordinary people who hold it and who can share it, because they each understand a little piece of it and can recognize when it might be useful.

The resiliency of Internet, designed to survive a nuclear strike, becomes visited on the human store of knowledge.

[Krullenjongen]

Well if you don't have too much data, say around 2TB and you have some time to write all that data to optical disks then i would advise:
"Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R"
Consider this exerpt from the website mentioned below the text.

"When it comes to optical discs, there is currently really only one type on the market that can be trusted for long-term storage, the Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R. This particular DVD-R has been made specifically to ensure long-term data stability and has been rated as the most reliable DVD-R in a thorough long-term stress test by the well regarded German c't magazine (c't 16/2008, pages 116-123). According to that test, the Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R has a minimum durability of 18 years and an average durability of 32 to 127 years (at 25C, 50% humidity). No other disc came anywhere close to these values, the second best DVD-R had a minimum durability of only 5 years.
One very important factor when burning DVDs that often gets overlooked, is that burn speed plays a very important role with regards to recording accuracy and reliability. For archival purposes we strongly recommend that you burn the DVDs at no more than 4x speed."

http://www.linuxtech.net/tips+tricks/best_safe_long-term_data_storage.html

You can buy then here for the US (for UK $ DE see the article): http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000H3B6EO/ln01-20


So if you don't have too much data and you have (a bit more than) a few hours to kill, this would be my choice.
To be sure to keep the data safe i only have to copy the whole lot again (and preferably twice, for two different storage locations) every 18 years ;)

[Ilie Pandia]

OK,

So I do have backups on local drive as well as on the cloud. Some of Paul's obsessiveness with backups has rubbed onto me as well :). But unfortunately I doubt many will have those in place, especially considering how bad the Windows backups programs are.

However I still need another backup plan that will survive any potential "electronics" collapse.

Reading the thread so far it seems that I need to do a few things:

- take the time to look trough and collect into one place all the books and documents that I consider relevant.
- get some Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R disks and burn the digital documents I've found previously.

To take this one step further it would be nice to have a sort of centralized and indexed library of stuff that many other users could easily copy and duplicate on their machine.

@Paul:
The problem I see with having information so widely distributed is that it may not be easily accessible. With a centralized library thing everybody would know where to look for info, but without a centralized index it would be virtually impossible to know who has what documents. I guess I'm concerned with my over reliance on Google to find the information I require quickly and reliably. But if Google goes away or decides to filter down access to the information I can find that would be a major pain for me.

[Ilie Pandia]

Here are some pieces of software that may come in handy:

Free Document Management Software: http://www.opendocman.com/

Free Tag Based File Management Software: http://silkwoodsoftware.com/index.html (so you can easily locate your files by tags and not having to remember the actual location on the files tree on your hard drive)

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

Do we have few issues at hand here?
1) way to preserve information so it is 100% lose-less. Carefully choosing recording medium. Making data redundant. Self replicating copies? Like viruses or malware?
2) way to track the changes made to that information so tampering can be detected. Hash codes? Change logs?
3) way to disperse that information and make it redundant. Some kind of distributed file system. Cloud? P2P networks?

If you look "distributed knowledge management" in Google some >3'000'000 entries will appear. But i think Illie the issue you bring forward is a tip of an iceberg. Unless our software and hardware is 100% fault tolerant at least by making it more redundant (i believe it can be done) we are bound for a major catastrophe. Imagine Google or WikiPedia (or the likes) being attacked by malware and their data stores being permanently erased by it. Try to do any "project" without consulting the internet ;) It is possible but it's "time footprint" grows big imo.

The data inside of a hard drives is safe against EMP from the Sun or a weapon. It its recorded onto metal disks surrounded by metal casing of a hard drive. To me it looks like a Faraday cage and should protect it from EMP. But not the electronic components. Fortunately electronics redundancy is unlimited. If it do not contains data. Hard drives are not immune to heat. Heat can alter data by reorienting magnetic domains on the surface of metal disks. And HD's are prone to G-forces acting on it. Accidental dropping can cause moveable parts for reading/writing (heads) to "jump" and scratch metal disks erasing part of the information. You can bury it in sand and it should be ok. Water would also be no problem - except for the electronics.

Optical media (CD, DVD, B-ray, HDisk) is safe from EMP, G-forces and water but not from heat and rough material (ex. sand).

Flash memory is safe from G-forces and rough materials but not from heat, EMP and water.

One drawback of all of them is dependence on electricity and some hardware (failure prone) interfacing that information to humans. Humans can not directly read it :( So we need mechanical intermediary.

The ideal "data center" would need to combine different media storage devices and make them store redundant information. There is also energy issue. If FE would become unshackled it is obvious it would be used as a power source :) Until then the data center would need different power sources (ie. wind, photovoltaics, thermovoltaics, fuel-cells, internal combustion, chemical) combined together and made redundant to backup each other. Now the data centers would need to be networked. They could be simultaneusly act as DNS servers, wifi acces points or GSM towers to provide remote access to the stored data inside. We equip them with GPS and place them in standard freight containers form factor to allow for portability.

The data centers would need an operating system and protocol for consolidating distributed information in one service...

[Ilie Pandia]

But i think Illie the issue you bring forward is a tip of an iceberg.

Yes, indeed. It seems like that the more I think of it.

The way in which we now handle information, always asking "what's new", quickly forgetting "what's best" and our past mistakes, hopping than in the digital world we can do or say anything because is "not real" so we can easily "erase it", it's a symptom of a much deeper problem.

Perhaps we are indeed overdue for a reboot :)

[ThePythonicCow]

So this is a serious question: how do we, as a people, preserve our history, our knowledge and data, from being destroyed, or centralized in the hands of very few that will be able to alter it or grant access to as they see fit?
The first several minutes of the following youtube video present another effort at durable data storage, called "stonebooks", described by Clif High (of HalfPastHuman):

MIExY-F8T2E
Webbot Project - Clifs Wujo with Clif High E-21 10/14/2012 (full)
E21 - October 14, 2012 - stonebooks update

[Anchor]

CD's and DVD's aren't "scratches" on a surface ... they are chemical reactions. As best as I recall, the archival life of CD's and DVD's typically varies in the range of about 2 to 15 years, depending on material.
Correction - here's some DVD media claiming to be good for 100 years: Verbatim UltraLife™ Gold Archival Grade DVD-R (http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/dvd/archival-grade-gold-dvd-r/). Purchasing 100 of them would cost about $160, or about $340 for one Terabyte.

Thanks for this link.

I like your idea of getting bigger and bigger disks and then keeping multiple backups - preferably in different physical locations.

This works because it is maintained and refreshed by a real live human. I dont rate the archival capabilities of my hard disks if say someone from the future dug one up and tried to work out what was on it :)

[ThePythonicCow]

I like your idea of getting bigger and bigger disks and then keeping multiple backups - preferably in different physical locations.
It worked well for the last 25 years.

I don't expect it will continue to work as well. The exorbitant privilege of earning a wage denominated in the world's reserve currency has allowed me to purchase many disks cheap. The exponential increase in disk data density and size for the last 25 years is also unlikely to continue, due to some coming economic break downs and a reversal of globalization.

I have switched, over the last couple of years, to getting redundant copies of the most durable computer hardware I can afford, with the expectation that I may be using much the same computer hardware for a long time to come.

[ThePythonicCow]

The first several minutes of the following youtube video present another effort at durable data storage, called "stonebooks", described by Clif High (of HalfPastHuman):Here's another explanation of "stonebooks" from Clif High, at StoneBooks Works
Global Challenge... (http://www.halfpasthuman.com/stonebooksworks.html):



September 21, 2012

Presently there are two potentially viable processes for producing our StoneBooks.

We are putting together a plan for crowdsourcing the necessary capital to begin testing the production issues involved with one of these processes. This first test is designed to produce a 'volume' that is 100 pages that are bound in a titanium housing. The process should produce a volume that will last about 30,000 years*.

It will be expensive to produce these so all our funds will go toward that goal. We intend to sell these to institutions, organizations, and rich individuals (we will likely offer 'vanity' versions as well). Any returns will be plowed back into the next set of volumes.

Here is the planetary challenge. We need to have smart people help us by reducing knowledge down to 100 page primers. These primers will have to fit on 5 by 7 inch pages. These primers will have to assume that NO language will be used. These primers need to convey their information in graphic format.

Our first test productions will be for Maths (geometry, and functional building maths), and Biology (specifically human birthing process).

We will be producing volumes on Astronomy (helical model), Biology (all forms of common medical/dental procedures), Biology ( animal husbandry), Farming, and anything and everything else we can think of over these next months.

However, each and every volume is expensive to produce, therefore this will not be a speedy growth industry.
More at the above link.

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

Paul, i like two things about the idea of Clif's stonebooks. Durability and using graphical form and nothing beside it to describe our knowledge accumulated so far.
But...
1) who will decide how this information will be presented? Will it be biased somehow?
2) the books are expensive to make and there will be not enough copies for everybody when TSHTF :( They have scarcity build-in in them :(
3) because of no. 2 people will kill each other to literally hoard that knowledge. If you watch Revolution you will know what i mean...

[rgray222]

I don't think it really matters and in some respect it might be for the better. I know that might seem shocking to some but when you ponder information and how to store it, one of a kind art, priceless manuscripts it seems meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Is there anything worth saving, maybe medical teachings and techniques to extend life but I am not even sure about that. Certainly life is worth saving but even that only last for the blink of an eye so life saving measures are only temporary at best. Death of information, an object or a person is inevitable, I don't really think any of it can be stopped, it can only be delayed.
I think when we get to the place that most of us are striving to reach, that knowledge is 'stored' in a way that it can never be erased or forgotten! The level of man's consciousnesses is on a road that has a final destination, getting there is nothing more than a learning or wisdom gaining experience. Storing information is tantamount to storing a photograph in a box for 20 or 30 years, when you open the box after all that time the image is no longer but the experience you were having when the photograph was taken is forever!

[TargeT]

I don't think it really matters and in some respect it might be for the better. I know that might seem shocking to some but when you ponder information and how to store it, one of a kind art, priceless manuscripts it seems meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Is there anything worth saving, maybe medical teachings and techniques to extend life but I am not even sure about that. Certainly life is worth saving but even that only last for the blink of an eye so life saving measures are only temporary at best. Death of information, an object or a person is inevitable, I don't really think any of it can be stopped, it can only be delayed.
I think when we get to the place that most of us are striving to reach, that knowledge is 'stored' in a way that it can never be erased or forgotten! The level of man's consciousnesses is on a road that has a final destination, getting there is nothing more than a learning or wisdom gaining experience. Storing information is tantamount to storing a photograph in a box for 20 or 30 years, when you open the box after all that time the image is no longer but the experience you were having when the photograph was taken is forever!


I think "death of information" has happened, but only for "most" of us...a select few understand fundamental reality truths that the rest of us have been lead astray from (for example : our current physics are based on E=MC^2, which is a COMPLETE JOKE, gravity travels FAR faster than the speed of light.. our sun is an electoral focal point not a "nuclear furnace" etc etc etc...)

I'll assume this is the motivation behind this thread... to prevent this from happening again.

[Ilie Pandia]

I just had a thought last night, right before falling asleep :)

The thought was: "Hoarding information and knowledge is not that much different than hoarding any other kind of stuff, and it's based in fear of loss".

[ThePythonicCow]

The thought was: "Hoarding information and knowledge is not that much different than hoarding any other kind of stuff, and it's based in fear of loss".
That's the key thought behind Open Source software :).

[TargeT]

I just had a thought last night, right before falling asleep :)

The thought was: "Hoarding information and knowledge is not that much different than hoarding any other kind of stuff, and it's based in fear of loss".

or anticipation of influence / power?

surely (if what we assume to be "TPTB" are as advanced as it seems they are/ could be) the knowledge was not used out of fear, but out of manipulation & for a power move.

if it was known that a "global reset" was cyclic (perhaps not even cyclic, perhaps just predicted) & it was planned for, those that kept the knowledge would be in a powerful position compared to those that did not know & /or plan for it.

a lot of assumptions there, but not too far off base I think.

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

I just had a thought last night, right before falling asleep :)

The thought was: "Hoarding information and knowledge is not that much different than hoarding any other kind of stuff, and it's based in fear of loss".
Illie, there is nothing wrong with that "hoarding" unless the hoard is not shared and freelly available to others...

I am currently through another book by Joseph Chilton Pearce. First was Magical Child (a must read for all parents! especially those parents planning on inviteing a new human being). Second was The Crack In The Cosmic Egg. Dealing mostly with our perceptionof reality and our apparent misunderstanding of cause and effect issue. You will never look the same after reading those two books.

Back to topic. Third book titled Evolution's End elaborate on topic of reality perception AND the source of knowledge. It is postulated there,backed with real life examples, that human (and probabably non human too) knowledge is stored in non localized field accessible to all. Acces is read/write mode :) Every being contributes to this field and can freely tap in to it. OBE, RV, telephaty and other simmilar phenomena can be explained by it. It has various names: Akashic records, morfogenetic fields and many other i guess but can't recall... So maybe we should focus on learning to consciously tap in to that already present store than to worry how to backup it?

[rgray222]

I think "death of information" has happened, but only for "most" of us...a select few understand fundamental reality truths that the rest of us have been lead astray from (for example : our current physics are based on E=MC^2, which is a COMPLETE JOKE, gravity travels FAR faster than the speed of light.. our sun is an electoral focal point not a "nuclear furnace" etc etc etc...)

I'll assume this is the motivation behind this thread... to prevent this from happening again.

There is no question that the speed limit that Einstein imposed on the universe is not correct. We also know that mankind will eventually be able to control or manipulate gravity and once that happens on a sustained basis then all bets are off. We also know that black holes greatly distort gravity, that fact alone discounts much of what we believe to be true on a scientific basis. Also quantum physics has been around since the 20's and we have not even scratched the surface, each year goes by the belief in dimensions and multiverses becomes a bit more of a reality.


The thought was: "Hoarding information and knowledge is not that much different than hoarding any other kind of stuff, and it's based in fear of loss".

In a way that was very much my point in the above post (#30). Fear motivates us to do virtually everything and once you understand that you can let a lot of it go. It makes little difference if it is fear of, bad work performance, marriage, loss of wealth, poverty, sickness, weight loss, divorce and yes even fear of losing information or fear of death.