Torrent the whole Geocities

[VLSmooth]

Here's an amusing reaction to the Geocities torrent.

Torrent the whole Geocities
http://www.darkmirage.com/2010/10/30/to ... geocities/

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that Geocities’ archive fits on a consumer-grade hard disk that you can get for under a hundred bucks today. Downloading the Internet has never been more literal.

I can only imagine the vast amount of raw data that future historians will have access to. Today, our archaeologists can extrapolate so much information about ancient civilizations from a few mud bowls and skeletons.

Tomorrow, there will be a whole class of historians called web historians who will create massive statistical computer programmes to analyse the significant events and social developments of the past. There will be archaeologists who specialize in ancient digital protocols and hardware manufacturing. And, I suspect, there still be people waiting for the Year of the Linux on the Desktop. (Except that desktops will have long been replaced by personal computers embedded in our bodies.)

[George]

Absurd. No digital medium we have today would retain information over the length of a dark age. They'll get from us exactly as much as we got from civilizations like Rome. Some legends, some pottery shards, maybe some jewelry and coins, a few ruined buildings that weren't recycled for scrap.

[Jonathan]

Over the medium term, you can copy interesting web info multiple times. The library at Alexandria lasted quite a while.

Long term, wars and plagues cause problems.

[George]

Consider the infrastructure required to make a copy of a terabyte of data. With today's technology, you use digital electronics to make trillions of microscopic changes. You need raw materials that I think aren't found on a single continent. You need refining facilities to turn those materials into useful forms. Alternatively, you need VERY good recycling facilities to reclaim the materials from the previous spare copies. You need manufacturing facilities to fabricate the media for the new copy. You need hardware to read the old media and write the new one, which itself requires materials, refinement, and manufacturing. You need electricity for all of this, so you need some sort of generator. You need labor that understands how to operate and maintain this infrastructure. And, perhaps most of all, you need to value that data enough to expend all these resources.

A number of sci-fi authors proposed creating a religion for this purpose. Essentially, make all the necessary steps part of detailed religious rituals, so that even if people lose the understanding of what they're doing, they can at least retain the value. Not clear that this would work outside a fictional context, though.