I stumbled across this really neat-o article today. It details the life expectancy of recording media and the prospects for preserving not only increasingly rare languages, but for preserving all of the information that humans are generating. I also noted this article from Wired magazine about the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the quest to locate and preserve them (they're lost!... and maybe destroyed!) I'm simultaneously reading Bob Woodward's The Secret Man, about W. Mark Felt's role in exposing the Watergate scandal. Woodward starts the book with a trip to the National Archives to view literally thousands of recently declassified documents from that era. All three relate directly to the persistence of important information and the physical degradation of the technology recording that information. I like the intellectual exercise presented in the first article: "How can we do better? What can we dream up to preserve our valuable information?" Any ideas or comments? Here's a picture of the Voyager 2 Golden Record to inspire you.
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