mandag 26. april 2010

STORING INFORMATION


To ensure the existing vegetation to global disasters such as nuclear accidents, plant diseases and other threats that can destroy plants, up to three million different seeds are stored in the permafrost in Svalbard. The norwegian government have created and built up the worlds largest colection of seeds. Gene banks around the world sends duplicates of all of its seeds to Svalbard. Thus, seeds from around the world is secured for the future. The vault is built 130 meters above sealevel, if all the ice in the world would have melted, the maximum rise of the sealevel will be 75 meters, meaning the vault is safe. To secure all this seeds for eternity is then, as done here, an easy task, human kind have quite an understanding of the worlds plants.
Then, what about the types of information we want to store, like the technological one.
The short term storage is quite easy, the problem starts to occur when we need to save this info long term. The best solution so far is the archival quality compact disk, and this is expected to last for app. 100 years. The other way to deal with the long term storage is UVC (universal, virtual, computer) wich require data to migrate from one system to another, allways changing the storage room. So, the securing and storing of data has become a Sisyphys task, a continious rearrangement of the data, moving bits from one system to the next with no end in sight. Eternity has now become procedural.

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