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Should archaeologists cover Pompeii back up when they're done with it? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

Hard drives don't last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You realize that there's more than one hard drive involved in preserving important information. Right? Of course you also realize that people in charge of preserving important information are also aware of the limitations and lifespan of the medium they use for storage, and have plans in place to overcome those challenges.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Suppose that, for one reason or another, that the people preserving said information died 500 years ago, and nobody alive understands how our current technology works. Should future civilizations' understanding of Pompeii be entirely reliant on a bunch of degraded old hard drives, or should they have a variety of options to learn what happened?

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 2 years ago

    Did we just jump 500 years into the future, or progress through time naturally, where people update records according to changes in society and technology?

    I get what you're saying, but we still have records older than Pompeii itself, and recording methods weren't even a fraction as good as they are today. If covering the site back up adds another layer of preservation, then by all means. But we can't recreate the conditions that preserved it so well to begin with. I think the experts know what they're doing.

    One reason that I personally think might be a good reason to cover it back up is because it's essentially a mass grave. People were frozen in time, doing whatever they were doing when the eruption occurred. It might be respectful to the dead to leave them there.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago

    Oh boy, let me tell you about this new thing we just discovered called "backups." Or this other thing we have called the "printing press."

    You see, it's possible to print 1,000,000+ copies of a book on Pompeii and digitize it, and then back up that digital file on 1,000,000+ hdd/ssds.

    To erase all of that, you'd need every copy of that book to be destroyed in many fires and solar flares or EMPs to knock out all technology ever. It is theoretically possible, sure, but it isn't like the only copy of the only book on Pompeii and also the only hdd containing copies are kept in the Library of Alexandria.

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