[IN THE NEWS] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Rali]

Ever wonder why everyone seems to be down in the dirt in post-apocalyptic settings, even several decades after? Even though we are so brilliant now and would probably be even more some time down the road? Why don't the survivors just use that knowledge to pick themselves up by the boot straps and get back to it?

Because everything we are is built on a house of cards.

Read this Article: Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

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Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity's knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?

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In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responsible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme.

Something to keep in mind next time your AtB players/characters try booting up an old computer that's been gathering dust in the ruins on the Crash, or wonder why the few surviving humans didn't just rebuild the nuclear power plants and fast food joints.

Of course, since AtB is science fiction, anything is possible.

[glitterboy2098]

actually, given the ATB2 fluff, it's more likely that you'll have more information surviving, but possibly fewer computers, thus making said info useless.

compared to the cold war era, computers today are far more fragile, but datastorage is moving towards non-volitile methods. like optical disks, Flashdrives, etc. heck, there is some work being done on holographic storage, which is encoding the data into 3D patterns within a solid crystal.

so it is likely that the DATA will survive the crash, but the nukes, weather, and enviroment will render the computers defunct.

[glitterboy2098]

Huh. So for a short time, our data will have been on volatile, ephemeral storage media, and our personal data will likely remain so (thumb drives) for the foreseeable future; but this will be sort of a growing period, after which our data storage matures into high-density, high-durability (relatively speaking) formats?

i refuse to make specific predictions in this regard, but i'd say this. the empheral nature of information will last as long as we rely on storage methods relying on magnetic properties of materials. (like current hard drives, floppies, and to a lesser extent flashdrives and ROM's)
even the current move towards things like CD's, DVD's, and blueray is only a slight improvement, since while those can hold data permanently even when exposed to EMP, power surges, or the effects of quantum decay...their physical forms are rather fragile and their data storage surfaces can be degraded easily.

so i'd suggest that if your players want to make a business of salvaging information from computer systems, you look at some of the different data storage methods being developed, researched, and predicted, and then decide which ones you want to use. then consider how well it would survive radiation, EMP, and the effects of wind, water, sand, and plants. then you can make the job as easy or hard for your players as you need it to be.

[Beatmeclever]

<SNIP>
(Warning! Butt-talking ahead. I will be talking from my butt now.)
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*clears throat*
<SNIP>

Is that what I think it is?

I'd say that characters should be able to have access in certain areas of the world but not in others. These access locations should have whole communities that would have formed around them (some big, some small). The discovery of new "hot spots" would be a remarkable event that would make a character group famous and possibly even very wealthy.