2001-07-28 || 1:25 a.m.

Information is obsolete.

So, apparently the old Voyager data says that there might be traces of life on Mars after all, but doing the research has taken forever because the Voyager data tapes are pretty old, technology has progressed, and there's no way to read them. Oh, and the only people around who could make use of the tech aren't actually around anymore...

When CDs came out, they were touted as being perpetual storage. they were indestructible. Data would never lose its integrity. We would have libraries of discs that would stand the test of time.

Well, *that* didn't work. Someone forgot to tell them about Moore's law, and all the varia that attend its movement. Varia like changing computer languages, file systems, and media formats. Nasa is chock full of discs of images that no-one will ever see because there's no way of reading them anymore. These discs are decaying anyway, so before long it won't be worth it to even try anymore.

The lifespan of any given datum generated by any of to-day's media can be easily measured in years or decades. We will eventually leave almost no record of anything between the 1950s and to-day, even though people will be able to find out plenty about Michelagelo or Cleopatra purely by the virtue of their having backed up their data onto analog media: Stone. Clay. Papyrus.

Much slower read-write times, much longer data life-cycle, oh, and no need for a special lens, laser, or machine; just an eye and an understanding of a language.

People will later consider this time to be a dark age because of this lack of permanent information.

Maybe that's the reason that the whole world operates on such a short lifecycle these days, from a given city's skyline changing as fast as possible, to music, clothes, and language developping at a breakneck speed. Everything is so short-lived and disposable that it's not possible to keep a society stable for anything resembling a long period of time. It's *got* to be linked to the short lifespan of our information. After all, information is the currency of a society, right? disposable information = disposable society. The medium is the message.

Stone. Clay. Papyrus. Carved words into plates of Nickel. Doesn't anyone know how to keep information around the old way anymore?



||Gods save the Queen,
||cf

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older shite

One last little note... - 09.21.2006

de-stressing, biking and terrorism - 06.06.2006

Mildly stressed... - 05.29.2006

More crime stupidity - 05.28.2006

Scary stuff - 05.25.2006



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