Comment by MostlyStable
2 months ago
This reads to me as mostly just an interesting way to teach about expected hardware lifetime assuming we were trying as hard as possible to keep things going. There is an entire genre of speculative SF that posits one major change and tries to think through the repercussions of that change. Often, the change itself is not very sensible, but it's also not the point.
I do think its interesting that digital records may not survive any sort of truly world war.
Its so easy to think of them as lasting forever
We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.