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[-] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 33 points 1 day ago

Unfortunately we did in fact lose the vast majority of dick drawings made 10,000 years ago and what has survived did so through mere chance. Not much has changed really.

[-] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We probably shouldn't store all our dick drawings in one place

But joking aside we should be better at this by now. Passing down knowledge that came before us is pretty damn important to science and human advancement. Unless we want every every generation to have to rediscover what germs are and stuff.

[-] AltMaarri@hexbear.net 11 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I think it's actually worse now than in the past.

All our paper and ink degrade very fast compared to the ones used historically; laser-printed stuff is even worse; and digital media (with the possible exception of tape, which might be slightly better than paper) worse than both. All our modern data is stored on such media.

There are some projects that exist; such as the memory of mankind project, which uses human-readable laser-etched ceramic tablets stored in an abandoned salt mine for long term archival. They also have ceramic micro-film, but one of their requirements is that the most important data can be read without any need for a computer, etc. hence the aforementioned larger tablets.

It's relatively small scale though.

[-] Runcible@hexbear.net 7 points 19 hours ago

Our information density is wildly higher though, you can't look at only media lifetime.

[-] AltMaarri@hexbear.net 5 points 17 hours ago

I was thinking about long-term historical traces (for which higher density tends to mean less lifetime), based on the dick drawings comment above; you're right for other considerations though.

this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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