Robert

And I doubt that the information on a CD will even survive that long. I can’t remember which archive it was, but they had converted many of their texts to CD storage.

Several months later they went down to read a few, and found them to have majors errors. They couldn’t figure it out till they looked at the disks under a scope.

Yep. A organism exists that can eat the plastic that CD’s are made of.

I wonder what the Jews will invent next!

Just curious, what was the last invention that Iran gave us? What possibly world changing thing for the better has it created?

Or is it against the Koran to invent anything new that didn’t exist back in day of their prophet?

It’s a real problem. We can read stone artifacts from 5000 years ago, but it is likely that the contents of a hard drive or CD will be completely unreadable in a few centuries. Even if the data survives, the technology necessary to read it will be long-since-obsolete, and possibly even forgotten.

One approach to long-term data preservation is to etch text at microscopic scales (like this Torah). This lets you store massive amounts of information in a small space, and future researchers won’t need anything more than an optical microscope to read it. Not as self-obvious as stone tablets, but a lot better than magnetic media.

Or just small enough to print all the suras on a roll… a two-ply roll…