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Ask HN: How can we make the world's code discoverable in 10K years?

7 points by 1arity ↗ HN
Global extinction level event, all our culture lost, but we want to keep a record of what we were doing. A library of Alexandria built in this age would contain much computer code. How to archive it in a format that's likely to be understood by future civilizations ?

8 comments

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airframeng
Same way we have records from 10K years ago, by keeping hard copies.

Pull the plug and all e-records become inaccessible.

1arity
Yeah, but hard copies on what? Discs, paper, what's the medium with the 10K year time horizon ?

Wait, I got it. Stone Tablets. Just have to get a Google project off the ground to inscribe all the worlds code in slate.

onedev
We can call it Project Alphabet.
imauld
Considering all the bits and pieces of plastic we have manufactured will be around on this planet until well after we are gone I would take a guess at saying plastic film would be best.
Mimu
I don't see the value of saving 'code'. Some algorithms maybe but I do believe the library of Alexandria is about ideas not tools.
1arity
Minimum description length could be a useful archival principle.
1arity
An idea is a tool is an idea. Or an idea is a description of a tool. In any case, code is a history of our time. A computed history. It encodes the way we thought about things, reflected in the way we arranged our systems of doing things. There's an argument to be made that it is a highly efficient description -- it might be possible to accurately rebuild a fallen civilization if we could read its computer code. At the very least, we'd have a start on rebuilding its infrastructure. The writings of a time encode its culture, you can rebuild a culture from that. The Renaissance did this with the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Code is a medium, of today. It works to save that, if we value the preservation of our time.