BBC: Digital Catastrophe Could Erase Recorded History

The reliance of humanity on digital technology raises the potential risk that a natural or man-made disaster could eradicate our collective history, according to the BBC.

Such a loss may perhaps be the result of technological obsolescence, malware introduced in cyberwarfare, or an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion.

An electromagnetic pulse coming in the wake of a nuclear detonation could take down the electrical grid nationwide, effectively bringing civilization to a halt. The loss of data could send humanity into a "digital dark age" according to Google vice president Vint Cerf, who has been referred to as the "father of the Internet."

Photographs, videos, audios, research writings and ordinary correspondence are nowadays stored as digital strings of ones and zeroes on computer servers or data farms around the world, the BBC reported.

With more than 4.4 trillion gigabytes of data stored digitally, any information that was corrupted or lost could vanish from recorded history forever, never to be seen by archivists and historians, according to the BBC.

Earlier media, from stones to parchment to paper, lasted comparatively long. Egyptian hieroglyphics go back to about 3500 BC. Digital files are far more fragile.

Data could also disappear through the kind of obsolescence that makes it hard to listen to music stored on 8-track tapes or to retrieve data backed up on floppy disks.

Unlike hardware, there is no depository that archives software with keys to unlock programs, plug-in extensions, and operating systems. "Future generations could be faced with an ocean of well-preserved but unreadable data because they have lost the keys to interpreting it," according to the BBC.

Cerf has called for creating the equivalent of digital parchment that would replicate content along with its software and operating system. This idea would depend on being able to "cloud" the data on the Internet — which is technically "not exactly trivial," Cerf told the BBC.

Those who discount the danger of a digital dark ages argue that industrywide data storage standards will soon become commonplace. "We're likely to see a rise in digital archiving services," said Jeremy Burton of EMC. His firm helped digitize 82,000 manuscripts in the Vatican library. The company used Flexible Image Transport System, a standard purposely designed for durability.

Governments and large companies using cloud-based computing are also storing databases in multiple locations, said Burton.

"There's a generation of folks growing up that will expect to get access to any information they want — not just data that's been created in the last day or month, but all data," Burton told the BBC.

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