Ask HN: Will future archeologist know about us, with everything encrypted?

3 points by kbrannigan •

I had this thought the other day that back in the days you could find an old journal you could find an old box full of pictures, you could find notebooks and old records but now everything is locked

and even the old computer like those computers you cannot even read the data to find your history even for yourself if you lose the data you're cooked you cannot find it So how are people going to know about our age since

we have so much pictures and nothing is printed and nothing is really documented really tangibly once the phone and the servers are gone and they are locked behind encryption

Even without encryption, data degradation will eventually erase most flash, optical and magnetic media.

Project Silica is a pretty cool example of how you could potentially circumvent this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

So in a way carving things in stone or clay was probably the right idea. A silly thought, maybe we had computers before

I have pictures, slides, official documents (a few) and some negatives from family in pre-internet and pre cheap disk drive times. And Dad's paintings.

Legible media were a way of "preserving what's worth preserving" via what wasn't thrown away, and give or take disaster or deliberate shredding.

A kind of quality ranking, but what do we do in the age of bot clickbait "quantity over quality?"

Must we keep everything? I'll keep my slides even after that are scanned, but I already sorted out the best out of space and access concerns.

Sometimes constraints nudge us in the "right" direction.

Looking at my disk drives (seriously in need of sorting ) very little is unique (my products) [0], a lot of photo files and scans, and a ton of material I downloaded from the internet, of which a tiny bit is really still useful.

And books and music score downloads, which will probaby be safely archived by others.

I don't regret giving away hundreds of pounds of printed musical scores. They never laid flat, anyway. The ipad does.

[0] even when 100mb disks were common, one author said that his writings would fit on a floppy.

Assuming that data degradation is not an issue and your data is available on a magnetic drive perhaps a future archeologist would have access to a quantum machine that would make decryption of the media possible.

So in a way, old inscriptions in clay tablets, carvings in Hieroglyphs , Nsibidi and other ancient languages are technically encrypted.

We needed to decrypt them first.

That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that insight.

at some point well realise its better to keep our data than to prevent others from having it...in the meantime we are in the dark ages

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