What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age'

SureIsHandOutside@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 327 points – What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of digital 'Dark Age'
spectrumlocalnews.com

Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.

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Imagine if, in 100 years, there was a massive Carrington Event and most of the world's data was destroyed. How would we piece our history back together?

How would we piece our history back together?

Maybe some kind of foundation to stem the period of bahbawism?

Remember what happened to that foundation? And the alternative doesn't actually work based on our medical and scientific knowledge.

Stupid psychohistory.

Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<

Bro Texas won't even pay to weatherize their power grid and they know cold weather happens every winter.

Wasn't it because the renewables system broke down

No that was the bullshit ercot put out to cover for the fact that fossil fuel production dropped by half or more. Source:

But the majority of the power losses were from gas plants, including 25 gigawatts of capacity that went offline. Coal and nuclear outages cut another 4.5 gigawatts and 1.3 gigawatts respectively, according to the University of Texas at Austin report. Considering that peak demand was about 70 gigawatts, losing about 30 gigawatts from gas, coal and nuclear was a disaster.

Wind energy also performed poorly, starting with ice accumulation that led to some wind farms needing to shut down early in the crisis. Wind power outages peaked at about 9 gigawatts, a number that takes into account wind levels on those days, according to the UT Austin repor

“It’s not like wind is blameless, but (the power crisis) wasn’t caused by wind failure,” said Webber. To say otherwise is “at best misleading, at worst an outright lie.”

Natural gas and coal totals 70% of their total generation, and wind was 20%, so losing half of both means fossil fuels was much more impactful.

To be honest this doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I’m sure there are countries that might spend resources on this, but mine 100% won’t. And if the majority of the world is screwed, I guess we can all agree there won’t be any stable place.

This episode of Why Files was really worrying.

We would definitely lose some data but I'm guessing there's a few hundred backups of Wikipedia and the important stuff floating around.

A huge solar storm could wipe out the backups too unless they're stored in a deep vault or something.

Solar storms arent really a risk for small electronics, more so if they aren't connected to the grid. You wouldn't need a deep vault, more like a cupboard.

There is a risk the hard drives wear out before society gets the grid back online and restarts producing hard drives though. We already don't have that many facilities and they would certainly be taken offline, and the knowledge to build those facilities, that might get lost properly when the storm would hit.

Would it effect optical media like CDs?

Time is more of a concern for CDs. They don't really last that long.

"All things are made of atoms; little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."