All right, the two Ballot Box topics were: - Salt Water Batteries (a deeper dive) - What Would Happen If A Solar Storm Kicked Us Back To The 90s? Which would you rather see?
Why were the programmers wearing horizontal stripes? Prisoners wear horizontal stripes... Is that SUPPOSED TO BE a joke?... the judges say...."GOOD JOKE!"
The library of Alexandria, the loss of our ability to make Roman concrete until VERY recently, our inability to make Greek fire, and the delisting of computer games demonstrate that the loss of knowledge is absolutely something that is worth considering. That's why it is soo important to keep hard copies or multiple backups of everything that's important to you.
I was one of those Y2K techs. I patched hundreds of servers to be Y2K compliant. It ended up not being a problem, but yes, because everybody got on the ball and fixed it. I think the bit-rot comparison is more a question of corporations not being incentivized to actually provide protection to the information. Companies go out of business and short of the Internet Archive, which is currently under an existential threat, there's no guarantee big swaths of information and history being lost. We're also getting to the point where the crude AIs we have are going to flood the internet with garbage in pursuit of SEO. You can already see the effects and Google's new AI has been spouting garbage. So finding good information in a flood of garbage is an imminent problem.
they all spout garbage. I was trying to look up information to help a customer with their computer problem. I go on HP's website where people were asking for help. I found they started using an ai bot to answer questions instead of having an actual person do it, and it was straight up LYING to people. telling people a device could do things when it couldn't, etc.
I'm a dev working for a high velocity algorithmic trading firm. I deal with 1-digit years all the time. Some exchanges use them in their symbols for products. Eg, EDZ5 is a Eurodollar futures contract that matures in December 2025. Or is it 2015, or 2005, or 1995, or...
I was at a Y2K party on Dec 31, 1999 and a friend noticed that the host was not patched on their personal computer. He telneted into this work server and got the BIOS patch for that motherboard, and fixed the issue with just moments to spare ! Then we all ran downstairs and did the midnight countdown with our watches which had been synchronized to atomic time ! Nothing happened. Good times !
Fear mongering being spread by people who don't understand cloud architecture. It sounds as if they think data is being stored in actual clouds and not in some physical 100 hectare warehouse.
Yes. far too many people treat Y2K like it was the next war of the worlds broadcast, or 2012/may 2005 conspiracy theory. Bill Clinton was actually annoyed with how people treated that. I remember a late night talk show interview with him in the mid to late 2000s where the host had brought it up, and he went on a kind of mini rant over how it was a very real danger and how much work people put into making sure the predictions DIDN'T come true. it was part of a greater conversation with stuff like foiled terrorist attacks and things like that. IE that people assume there was no danger because nothing bad happened.
Yes I spent months fixing y2k bugs at work which would have caused chaos then had to prove to auditors that the software was good! Definitely lots of hard work around the world fixed it!
Been listening to your videos all morning. It’s produced some interesting questions from my granddaughter. Just wanted to say thanks for producing interesting, fact based videos in a format that is kid friendly. No cursing, no graphic description of things that would give her nightmares. We had a very interesting discussion about why certain people didn’t think other people could build things like the pyramids and thought it was space aliens. A seven year olds perspective is interesting and I’m finding more about how she thinks. Thanks again!
If natural death no longer existed, can you imagine how incredibly tragic accidental deaths would become? I imagine the world becoming oppressively risk averse rather rapidly.
Population would be a bigger issue, it would surprise you how fast it would happen too. Millions of people are born every day. I doubt we could solve it fast enough.
@@Sundablakr And even if we did some half life contraception type stuff, who knows what that would do to us culturally since new generations aren't being born (if this happened 1700s for example slavery would have a good chance of still being around). I really just don't think it'd be good for us as a species to achieve immortality yet.
Not only incredibly tragic, but also successively more likely the longer you live. Even if we assume that the probability of lethal accident (or other circumstances resulting in the same outcome, like "encounters" or illness) does not exceed a certain small amount of, say, 0.1% for every given year (or even decreases due to increased risk adversity), the numbers would still add up over longer and longer lives. We basically would still have a finite life expectancy due to it becoming ever more likely that something will get us eventually.
@@Sundablakr A huge driving force of having children is actually the rather short time span in which women can bear children. If by curing aging we also eliminate menopause, there suddenly wouldn't be a reason to have children "now" rather than "eventually". Combined with an increase in risk adversity the OP already suggested (and childbirth is still not completely risk free), we would probably see birth rates doing a literal nose dive.
@@lonestarr1490 Honestly, given a world population that until relatively recently had been soaring, and the impact of more and more humans on the environment, I'm not so sure that would be a bad thing. I can imagine a LOT of people would put off having children if they knew they could have healthy children later, and consequently they'd probably be better educated, wiser etc. when they had their first child and likely better parents vs. somebody having their first kid at 16, not being able to properly financially, emotionally or educationally support that child etc.
Seeing the Northern Lights was a bucket list thing for me, but I never thought I would actually get to see them. I recently moved to northern canada, but not far enough north to see them. I am pretty sure this is as far north as I am going to get, so I resigned myself that it just wasn't gonna happen. Then this event happened, and as I walked out onto my balcony I watched the entire sky light up with my wife. We were gobsmacked and stared at it for almost an hour. We took videos and were amazed at how much more vivid and stunning it appeared through the lense of the camera. Awe inspiring... and it felt amazing to check something off a list I thought would never happen. Awesome.... literally the first truly Awesome thing I have ever seen.
An easy example of bit rot in my experience is internet forums. I've been a member of a couple and am aware of many others that are just not around any longer. Like so many spoken words without a permanent record, everything or nearly everything posted to those forums is now gone. You might find some captures on the Internet Archive or some such, but they will be snapshots that typically won't even include the thread contents, and they many, many pages of threads will also be largely if not entirely inaccessible, as will be the user account pages and everything else. The web is not permanent, and given that it relies on many interconnected computer systems just to exist, it will likely not even outlast books and other physical media. At some point, some event will destroy more bits and more archives of bits. It is all as impermanent as the civilization that created it.
"the internet never forgets" Not only bit rot - how many forum threads where crucial components are gone because fomains were not maintaned and links lead to nothing or image hosts shut down. The reliance on clouds, dervices that could change at any time, sometimes with no real feasible alternatives. Bancruptcy or a malicious attack, and exabytes are gone. Subscription based movies and series, never on physical media, shelved, forgotten and deleted, if not ripped and maintained by digital robin hoods... This isn't something a patch can fix like in Y2Ks case.
I am FINALLY, after 2 years, finishing the Wheel of Time book series and then... off into The Expanse!!! I have purposely kept myself in the dark about the series and I am so pumped to start!
What I find really interesting will be that say 1000 years from now people will be able to watch high quality videos going back 1000 years. Being able to watch news clips, entertainment bits, historical events that took place eons ago. It would be like US being able to watch the news from 1024 AD. That is something that people of the future will take for granted.
It is actually kinda hard, at least for me, to find news broadcast from the past. Certainly they are out there, but not a heck of a lot. Try picking a random date and searching for a news broadcast. EDIT: Actually, I just checked and it is better than it used to be. 😁
Oh! Now that is an awesome thought! I'm always more pessimistic about it. I always think about all the things I will miss after I die, mostly I'm worried about not getting to be in nature anymore. I can't imagine not hearing birds and bugs, and all the trees and plants. It just super sucks that all that will go away someday for us all. Lol soooo sorry for that bummer of a comment!
My dad used to work for TXU Energy (back then, it was TU Electric) in the 90s and early 00s. I remember him working a lot of overtime to get everything prepared and configured in the year leading up to the new year. Always makes me roll my eyes when people say Y2K wasn't a big deal and nothing bad happened
Basically the same thing as with climate change: if nothing awfully happens, people will say it ain't so bad, completely neglecting the amount of work do many other people put in.
@@lonestarr1490 People of Florida: "We can't insure our homes because of sea level rise and more powerful storms!" Florida's governor: "I'm going to ban any consideration of climate change and the term itself from our laws." (facepalm)
@@deadly_dave Somebody with way more knowledge than I should elucidate and clarify, but what I recall was a concern about the way date data, specifically the year portion, would be dealt with, because the 1 in 1999 did not need to be stored, as there were no computers in 999. But with Jan 1, 2001, suddenly all 4 digits needed to be stored, and weird things might happen otherwise, like subtraction between two dates to get an age give a negative number.
I’ve gone about halfway of the 1 in california. The most important thing to note if you’re going to drive it is go south. If you’re driving north, you’re going to see mostly rock. South you’ll be able to see the shoreline and no one will be in your way.
I’ve been a UI/UX developer for 15 years. The internet has become a lot less useful and usable in the last 15 years despite our combined efforts to integrate more accessibility features into the web. I can barely look at most sites because of the amount of ads on my phone. Yet another area we have focused more on making money than making something better.
you seem like such a chill guy honestly your whole approach is just comfy and welcoming part of why i watch. the other part is cool topics like this one.
As for the hotel in "So I Married An Axe Murderer", the bad news is its not really a hotel. The good news is its actually called the Dunsmuir Estate, located in Oakland, CA, and its available to rent for special events (and other film shoots including "View To A Kill" and "Phantasm") Its also open to the public on occasion for various city and holiday events.
@@benjamindover4337 I grew up in San Leandro, right next to Oakland, and went up there numerous times. It was always fun to spot the house in various films.
Three Body Problem has a bit on 'bit rot'. In the end they figured out that literally carving their history into Pluto (iirc) was the longest term storage media they could make. Even with a few hundred years of tech over us. CDs/DVDs do eventually decay. Same for SSDs and HDDs, though those go faster. Even paper decays on a long enough timeline even in a near-vacuum. Plus with digital storage you have to worry about format. Basically you gotta include a working laptop that has instructions on how to use it printed nearby, and then more instructions on all the file formats and data storage techniques used. Then somehow keep the laptop battery in good enough condition for it to work. There's the millennium clocks and 'Clock of the Long Now' which is similar to this but with time itself.
Over 10 years ago there were reports at attempts to put digital information into glass crystals that would last for a minimum of 5,000 years. Not sure what happened to that. In any case our information shared on the Internet is repeated over and over again now. So even if the original source is lost the knowledge itself isn't. It's not like back in the day when most people were illiterate and the only source of knowledge was the 1 book that 1 guy wrote and possibly ended up in the library of Alexandria. Without being too morbid, the way We're going, our information could outlast us with no One to make use of it, making it useless anyway. Oh and a quick shout out to my r/w cd and floppy disk somewhere with my old CV stored.
I think we could figure out some basics of innate human linguistic patterns, but the inverse problem is our making assumptions from that which WON'T apply to others or perhaps even people in the future. If you use physics and chemistry (for example), you then require your future audience to have that literacy. I suppose the simplest way would be mathematics and you would have to teach to them the language as you go. The simplest way is hard 😂
I’ve heard the idea of putting a satellite with everything stored on it in a Lagrange point, to give it the best chances of survival through deep time. In The Expanse, someone built a computer the size of Jupiter then parked it around a star and emptied the rest of the matter from the solar system (I think that’s right, it’s been a while)
Honestly it kind of feels like a non-problem to me. For a lot of things, it's *nice* but not *necessary* to have original copies still around. The knowledge is the knowledge, it doesn't need to be on the original vellum, paper, stone, or hard disc. So we just keep doing what we're doing now - copying our knowledge onto a new sheet of paper, a new disc, a new stone. Updating the language to make sense to the current readers, and enough sense to immediate-future generations that they can translate it into their own vernacular as well. We also keep copies of the original language, of course. But you read a textbook on optic from the 1860s, 1960s, today, and 2060s and (even ignoring improvements in what we know) the language is much different to reflect the usage and language of the day, even if the information is the same. Of course, it doesn't really help if there's a sudden disjoint in humanity - like an apocalypse, or all our machine data getting wiped in a solar storm (although we're mostly hardened against that for the truly important information). But in a "business as usual" situation, while it's *nice* to have durable data storage, I don't think it's apocalypse-causing in and of itself for us to not have it.
@@hypotheticalaxolotl This is a major issue with dealing with very long term toxic waste, e.g. depleted nuclear fuel. How do you leave a message saying "Don't dig here, it will kill you."
I'm British and we have done highway one in California. I did it with my wife a few years ago, it was great, Pizmo beach was a lovely chill place to hang out, everyone should do that trip.
Ishmael was such a great book. It was given to me and I gave it to a friend. Then I bought a new copy, read it again, then gave it to a friend. Repeated this process a few times now.
Check out some of Daniel Quinn's other books- they all follow the same themes of philosophy, existence, and thought, but focus on separate subjects in those areas and are entertaining stories as well.
We had to join the lists for SAA during grad school and data (especially context) is lost every time data is migrated. It is a big deal for archivists. Preserving the most content and context as data is migrated to prevent AI hallucinations influencing common knowledge is one of the new concerns.
I haven't heard of any of those SciFi shows you mentioned in the last question. I stopped paying for cable TV in 2005 and have only used the Internet for "TV" ever since. Nowadays all my watching is on TH-cam (with a family Premium subscription). With so many great channels like Joe Scott, I'm fulfilled. I see no "need" to keep up with popular shows.
I stopped paying for cable in 2016. MSNBC I watch on TH-cam and the NFL is on network TV, and baseball is on the radio or on text on my phone. And I'm not big into basketball and hockey. And really there's nothing else I miss from cable.
TH-cam videos are what I watch when I'm bored at work. Otherwise, I don't consume any video media. My media consumption tanked after I divorced and realized that was something I did with her, not something I did for myself.
re: the fermi paradox question, your perspective is one that i also hold in my cloud of possibilities when it comes up but i heard a fantastic take from a speaker on the event horizon podcast who summed it up perfectly by saying, in extreme short form to his answer 'no one is talking to you yet because you're only assuming you're interesting and maybe you're really not' and that has become my favorite so far. it's not positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic for the probability of us making contact or why we haven't. it's the exact logic for why somebody living with 8billion other people might not have any freinds. and that's the most grounded and believable answer i've heard so far. "existing" doesn't guarantee you an invite to the party much less a date. and i think people find that depressing.
I used a friend who did research into battery technology. He got badly burnt when molten salt/sulphur battery he was addressing blew up. This was back in the seventies. His first job was working as Stirling Moss' mechanic. Miss you Mike.
I think you misunderstood Hendrick's question. I'm a computer scientist so I'll pretend to be an authoritative source until some other comment corrects me. Digital storage mediums are fundamentally different to traditional ones. While carvings in stone or writing on paper will (more or less) survive so long as they are not directly damaged, digital storage 'rots' over time in a unique way such that the device itself can be flawless but the contained data will independently degrade. ZFS/BTRFS/your favourite server grade file system is periodically reading (scrubbing) the data to detect correctable errors, but then also _rewriting_ it so it's as if the data is new. There's no such thing as bit rot in the cloud because the data never actually sits that long before it's refreshed. Under the most ideal conditions, the data on a disconnected HDD/SSD/tape will only last tens of years. The concern with respect to the death of the internet is that even if you somehow download everything first, you cannot simply throw it in a vault---it inherently requires infrastructure on the scale of said dying internet to maintain it which is contradictory to the whole death thing. We taught rocks to think yet their memory is also use it or lose it. The only real long-term solution is to unironically write the ones and zeros on paper or some equivalent (long live punch cards
It doesn't help that Data migration causes degradation in content and risks corruption. even if we find a way to preserve it much of the context is lost and it gets increasingly confusing. Then again I got my MLIS archives specialty in 2016, cloud storage has improved and decreased some issues with data migration. But every time a doc is converted there is a risk of losing important info.
@@UsahMahin every time data is saved or backed up, even automatically, there is a risk of data corruption. Errors can occur and there isn't a way to just unsave a damaged file. You have to hope the original is still viable. So if a system auto updates to prevent unauthorized access or just because systems are constantly changing, to keep the info accessable you risk making it unusable.
@@UsahMahin that may not be the exact reason OP meant, but that is just what I can contribute as an archivist. Not necessarily a computer science experiment. I have an info science degree, not computer science.
Going past data degradation, part of the idea of the original question came from people who had been around in the early days of the internet and noted that some places they used to visit and maybe even had bookmarked as a resource would disappear as people stopped maintaining them. Sure, a lot was Geocities quality and probably not a great loss to civilization, but maybe some was? There is also the problem of good data being buried by trash data as we produce more and more information. As Sagan said, not all bits of data have the same value. Combine that with the deterioration of search engines in favor of sponsored ads, the potential for some "good stuff" to be lost is pretty good. And as the original question mentioned, that which might be trained on before being lost by LLMs and the like would be a ghost memory of something, possibly not keeping the entirety of context.
Everytime I plan to watch something new I'm reminded of an old series that I suddenly have to rewatch and I completely forget about the new show. Just finished SG1 for the umpteenth time and I don't regret it at all.
I also go back to SG1 and watch them all again, along with Atlantis. One can only hope now that Amazon owns MGM that we can get a new project in the vain of SG1.
I recently sat down and started to watch Farscape for the first time. I'm six episodes in, and I'm struggling with it. I don't mind the Muppets -- those are incredibly well done. But I really have a tough time with Crichton. The guy is *supposed* to be an *astronaut* -- literally, the best person out of two to four million people -- and he keeps making *inexcusably stupid* decisions. Sometimes, it's just painful to watch -- but I stick with it because it's supposed to improve tremendously after the first season, and some of my friends swear by it. I dunno, though.... 😣
Your comment about sticky is funny. I just got done chatting with a friend about a similar question and my assessment is that based on how many extinction level events we have had on this planet. When life finds a way it's going to be a hard timing getting rid of it. Something will persist and evolve even on a sing cell level.
My favorite for the Drake Equation/Fermi Paradox question is the Dark Forrest and Grabby Aliens hypotheses, compounded by what I've heard referenced as the "Dinosaur Problem". For us, the animals which have shown a predilection towards intelligence have all been mammals (aside from some questionable conclusions about octopuses). Mammals filled an ecological niche towards the end of the dinosaur era around that of squirrels, shrews, and such. I find it unlikely that we have just missed every mammal bigger than that size in the fossil record. So, the dinosaur problem is basically getting the metabolism and calorie requirements that seem to be needed in order to develop intelligence. It's hard to get large enough to push toward intelligence when all the ecological niches that would allow the size needed already filled with relatively predatory species.
Your video "Contact was wrong" did a great job of explaining why we haven't heard anyone and why no one has heard us. My answer for the Fermi Paradox is the ridiculous scale of the universe.
Well, kinda. The Fermi paradox, at least originally, is not exactly about making contact or hearing someone, but about finding any form of trace of intelligent, space faring life. The amount of time the universe already exists for would have been more than sufficient for any species capable of leaving its home world to colonize the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy. So it's not so much about someone seemingly not being anywhere, but about them obviously not being literally everywhere.
@@lonestarr1490 It may be that space travel is astonishingly hard. For example if the planet is more than twice the size of Earth: reaching escape velocity with a rocket is impossible.
@@lonestarr1490 I mean, it would only take a civilization 200 thousand years to colonize the Milky Way, our galaxy, with sublight technology going 90% the speed of light. With how old our galaxy is, and how many planets there are, you'd expect at least one of them to have a civilization that's got a measly 1 million years ahead of us. Considering our galaxy is estimated to be over 2 billion years old, it's weird we see no one out there colonizing or building galactic megastructures, as you'd expect. Personally I think our own species is only a few centuries away from interstellar travel, like the nearest star systems would only take about 15 years to reach at 30% the speed of light, which should be doable in the near future.
@@lonestarr1490 it could also be that a more intelligent species would see us as so primitive as to have no value to their society, like apes are to us, and have left us to our own devices to quietly study our society. No idea tho this is total conjecture just my personal theory. :)
@joescott Thank you so much for recognicing that the reason we didn't have a Y2K problem, was because a huge number of people worked tirelessly to avoid it. I so often hear the Y2K problem used in the context of worrying for nothing, so it's nice to see some reocgnition of the huge amount of work people did.
In the '70s my dad made a battery with coins of different metals with paper in between that was soaked in salt water. That gives a whole new meaning the words "assalt and battery".
Pretty sure bitrot is specific to storage media. It seems like the person thought all data just spontaneously deteriorates, which is not the csse. That's why there's hierarchy of media for storage purposes and why very important stuff is still written to magnetic tape. SSDs are most vulnerable, which is why you see people usually utilize standard spinning hard drives in nas devices.
That.. though data can also rot on active devices as files are copied and errors are accidentally introduced. It's rare, but it happens. Alternatively, sites like TH-cam will re-encode old videos to make them playable on new devices and software versions, degrading the quality in the process. Or the experience may degrade even if the data is intact: old video games don't look right unless they're played on period correct CRT displays, for example.
No, entropy happens to all things. The timescales can vary widely, and it's true that ssds < hard drives < tapes, but tapes degrade too. Paper degrades. The state of the art right now is glass, but even that has a (n estimated) shelf life of "only" a few hundred million years.
@@helmaschine1885 Well I don't seem to be able to post a link but Microsoft has project silica. They're only claiming 10000 years though. I'll keep searching for the original article that I'm pretty sure made a much larger claim, but wanted to give you something to answer your question even though it's not the sensational claim from my first comment. Maybe some entropy slipped into my brain.
How do you know this!!? Impressive. I have never even thought about this as a thing and here you are: an expert who works in a field I never knew existed.
Unfortunately, all the Star Trek stuff is locked away behind a relatively obscure pay wall now where it will become significantly less a part of our social fabric than it once was.
@@spark_coder I think the only way to watch any Star Trek series now is to pay for Paramount's streaming thing so a lot fewer people will be seeing it, which is a shame.
There saying 60s and 90s Trek was broadcast (with ads) for free, and everyone had a TV and lots of people watched it... where as today you have to pirate or subscribe to a service, so media is less unified, more niche, and sometimes behind a paywall - so less people are watching specific things. Meaning where as Star Trek was a cultural touchstone in the past - modern Trek likely won't be recalled or considered with the same level of familiarity or sentimentality.
ReFS is not a replacement for NTFS, and it is in fact missing a huge amount of features from NTFS that Microsoft is not planning to port at all. ReFS is basically meant for server workloads and specially development environments because it has way more modern and efficient file system filters than NTFS as well as some unique interactions with other systems such as Windows Defender and Windows Search Indexing that mitigate the pitfalls of anthill tools (lots of tiny files) like Git and NPM. The most obvious dead away is that the only official way to format a volume as ReFS right now is by creating what Windows calls a "development drive" from the Developer section of the Settings app in Windows 11 Pro for Workstations and Windows 11 Enterprise.
An idea for a video... Cover how language can dictate our personalities and how we percieve things as well as how language effects a society on the level of a country with one dominant language and how it compares to a country who's inhabitants speak numerous different languages. Then how language over time changes and how that effects us as well. The film "arrival" is such a crazy topic. How the lead character starts to percieve the past, future, and present more and more as she begins to understand the aliens way of communicating. I think you may have briefly touched down on it but it's such a crazy thing I think it deserves a good video on it.
The Fermi Paradox isn't about why others can't hear us. Which our time thing would be an explanation for. It's why we can't hear others, with the argument being that we only took 4 billion years from earth cooling down to being on the cusp of space expansion, which will eventually get to be galactic. That's nothing on the galactic time scale. Why aren't there more that were around earlier?
The point remains that us humans have only had the technology to send signals into space for 100 years and since then have moved on to signals that will be very hard to identify as human broadcast from deep space. Modern broadcasting looks a lot like noise unless you know exactly what you are looking for, so mix that in lots of background noise and those aliens wouldn't consider this planet as "broadcasting" anymore. And assuming also aliens will have gone through similar evolution, it means we can only recognize them during those 100 years they were analog broadcasting and that's a tiny blip that needs to match the window we have to receive them at the distance we are from them. Detecting stuff like Dyson spheres might be more likely ... 7 observed candidates I heard a recent paper claimed ...
@@MisterkeTube I was just explaining the fermi paradox, because I made the same false assumption about what the paradox was about. The Galaxy has planets likely around 12-13 billion years old. The Galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide (which is wide, yes, but not billions). If we assume that the first planets could support life (doubtable), and that life could be spacefaring, and that they were on the literal polar rim of the galaxy, they could make it across the entire galaxy, only averaging 7-8k miles per hour. For reference, the Parker Solar Probe reaches 430k miles per hour. That's where the fermi paradox come from. For further exploration: If we had a Parker Solar Probe spend half its time cruising at that speed, and half its time colonizing, we could spread through the entire galaxy in around 312 million years, on current propulsion technology. With the galaxy's planets being up to 13 billion years old, that's basically nothing. There are solutions: Particularly named Great Filters.
Yeah, Joe touched a bit on this. The fact that our present and even the last century, is an infinitesimal small time compared to the age of the universe. Personally I mostly agree with him on this but also want to add that our technology is still relatively new and we're really expecting too much given the scale of space and our current scientific and technological knowledge. So the reason we haven't heard anyone is because we've barely looked. It's like someone going outside their rural house, not seeing anyone and shouting 'where is everyone' and then automatically declaring they're the only person on earth because they hear nothing back. When the fact is, maybe we just can't hear each other or they don't want to talk to us. The former being more likely than the latter imho.
@@desperado3236 Again. That's not really the question. It's that the time to colonize the galaxy is so insignificant compared to the life of the galaxy, that we should already be surrounded. It's why the equation doesn't include "time to evolve intelligence." It's "what percentage of life evolves intelligence?" Because the time aspect is so insignificant, compared to what has already passed. Now, where you would progress from there is the topic of Filters. Like, perhaps the early planets simply lacked the necessary ingredients for (intelligent) life. The galaxy was also much more.. active... the further back you go. If you think space is hostile now, you'd be shocked by what it was back then. Then, once you factor in filters, things make much more mathematical sense.
I think an important point is that on Earth, a paradise compared to most of the planets we've discovered, it took 4 billion years of relative stability for life to develop to the point where it can send and receive signals. This is why time is part of the answer.
I've always wondered... I'm not worried about the data itself degrading.. I'm worried about having a working machine that can read the data. Imagine if you had to retrieve the world's knowledge from well preserved VHS tapes, but no one makes functioning VCRs anymore or even knows how to. I know there's still working VCRs today, but what about 100 years from now?
Joe, sci-fi has addressed so many of these ideas in so many different ways. Long life: I recommend reading The City And The Stars by ACClarke, which was written 70 years ago, and addresses the idea of extremely long-lived humans. (Item - when you meet someone else who lives 1000y, it's considered rude to spend less than half of a day on personal greetings and catching up!) Me, I'd selfishly love to live on and on, /with no further physical or mental degradation only/, to take up all of the hobbies, arts, skills, etc. that pique my interest.
The coolest use of AI I have found personally is a DAW called RIPX that uses AI to analyze music and separate the sounds into different instrument layers. Which is allowing me to remove undesired sounds from the mix in old songs I lost the save files for over the early years of music production. Soon I will be able to improve and finish a ton of song Ideas that were otherwise lost to time at the hands of glaring flaws.
@@johnnycandles8675 and I haven’t watched it myself, just heard that it’s good. (Nor have I read the books, and I ain’t got much of an excuse for that. Just lack of motivation for all of it…)
@@johnnycandles8675 Well, hard ish, kinda, somewhat, in the books. A little less in the show, if I remember correctly (for example, I'm pretty sure they had space sound effects; also, they skimped on some of the concepts of the books, probably for budget reasons). But it's still another league than ... well, most of the rest out there.
It's not bad, but can be kinda hard to get into because you have to endure one of the most annoying, oblivious, self-righteous made-hero-by-circumstances fumbduck sonny boy non-character MCs out there for a looong time ... before he eventually matures into an actual person. You should read the books, too. The show diverges enough from the source material to enjoy both like they were different interpretations of the same thing, if that makes any sense.
The idea of losing all of humanity's most important information is a very real possibility if it is only saved electronically. The idea of a reset of all electronic technology is an even more realistic possibility. Definitely worth an episode
Spot on for the drake/Fermi issue. Each civilization even if it survived for centuries is still such a small blip in time and as you say we have to be looking at the right spot at the right time, quite a challenge. I think it would be quite a thing for us to actually find something even in a "teeming" universe as space and time are sooooooooooooooooooooooo huge, really beyond what an individual can actually conceptualize (may as just say infinite for our small brains) and we are but a microscopic speck on the whole thing.
The Demolition Man reference is great, but the whole "Every restaurant is TacoBell" quote is grand, but how about the other add placements that were changed in the movie. TacoBell was replace on a video version and a TV version of the movie with Pizza Hut, due to digital overlay. Although the two franchises are owned by the same mother company, it's still a crazy thing that a lot of people don't even notice and it actually happens more than they think. Like a purposeful Mandela effect. Do a video on that subject Joe. It's a huge conspiracy that no one is talking about. It's basically how they change history without big resistance... I have spoken... Captain out...
i think Joe missed the point of the question on bit rot. And Joe is not at all wrong in his answer btw. But there's a specific nuance to this which i believe the question was trying to get at. i'll use 2 examples to better explain the guy's point: 1. Say that sometime in the future, the game devs of Minecraft decide to permanently close their servers (unless you have a private server, i dunno how that works). Now, apart from all the people losing their worlds that they've made inside the game, there are a lot of people who have passed on and their MC world is left as a legacy of their life and time here. So, maybe you can salvage your MC world idk. But what about the world's of those people who are now dead? *How do we preserve that?* We lose all the inner worlds from people who can no longer show their worlds. 2. And this is my literal nightmare so here it goes: EU has this law which is called Right To Forget or something like that. It basically means that without someone actively maintaining their site/account in a social media, they will lose everything because the sites will automatically delete it after a set amount of time. Previously it was 2 years and now it's 1 year i think. But, we know that there are TONS of people who are no longer alive, but had created sites and say.. tumblr posts talking about their world, their life stories, many have written biographies in their site, etc. *HOW DO WE PRESERVE THAT??* Again, so many unsaid voices will be lost forever. Those sites and posts might be that person's late remaining legacy on this planet (Yes. There are cases like that.) But those are probably already gone. i know for a fact that 3 of my friends who are no longer with us, their accounts are managed by their next of kin. But what happens after a while? If it's no longer possible for them to actively keep it up? Will my friends be forgotten forever? So, it's more like, what can we do to preserve these individual stories. They're not "famous" people. So that mean they deserve to be forgotten? Only famous people can be remembered? The modern world has supposedly tried to change that, but now, we've back tracked. How do we save the collective humanity?
You're totally right here... even without the EU laws, companies were not going to host things forever. I think the best answer we have to this right now is the Internet Archive. I don't think the policy issues here are clear cut -- it's a problem, to be sure. I think the right to be forgotten is important in the short term, but for the long term, generations after we pass away, that we owe them what I guess would be a "right to remember". (IIRC the Internet Archive's approach is to archive but keep private things they aren't allowed to share, so that it'll be available to future anthropologists and historians.)
@@_iarna_ Thank you for sharing!! Does IA store a person's internet blog? If so, can a dead person's last surviving thoughts, notes be uploaded there without being removed for being obscure or not worthy of the greater society? Yeah i also think right to forget works for ridding bot accounts, etc. but ultimately it does more harm.
You can't mandate others to do this for you. If this is something you think is worth doing, you'll have to DIY. Maybe once you get your methods and systems down, you can share that, and others who would want to do the same, will be able, because of your work. And i'm betting that would earn you a bit of legacy, if you did it. However, unfortunately, we'll all be forgotten someday... or worse: remembered incorrectly, because a false image of who you were, is useful to someone else.
I feel like curing aging would result in a serious generational wealth issue, involving nepotism, inheritance, influence, interest, etc. "You have to know somebody to get a job," but going back twenty generations on some ancient Montague / Capulet beef.
Centrailia isn't really anything anymore. It's like an abandoned area, some abandoned areas and houses, an abandoned highway area, but they have mostly blocked, destroyed, or cleaned things. You can go down the hill one way and there is old houses in a living town or go the other way and there is a mall area with delicious coal fired pizza.
I think Joe just solved the Fermi paradox, like the explanation makes so much sense it feels dumb that it's even considered a paradox. It really is just time.
The Fermi paradox is deeper than us not finding them or them not finding us. If there was a successful technological species out there somewhere, it's reasonable to assume they would have mastered energy production on a stellar scale, or higher. Within the lifetime of a star, there's plenty of time to colonize a significant portion of the galaxy. All of that development would have indelible effects on the observable sky. Yet there is nothing out there that we've seen that appears to have an artificial origin. Furthermore, even though we've only been broadcasting for a century or so, the "red edge" biosignature of Earth has been announcing life since before our species existed. If advanced intelligence was out there, they would already know about us. So then does that imply they're not out there? Or intentionally hiding? Or so psychologically alien that somehow they have advanced technology but no curiosity? Hence the paradox?
@@aelolul I think one of the issues that may cause any intelligent lifeforms to not discover us could be the fact if they are more than 4.5 bly away, looking in our solar system, the Earth wouldn't exist. Over 2/3rd of the universe would not even know Earth is a planet. We are invisible to anyone looking from that distance. We probably have the same issue, looking at other star systems and determining there are no habital planets in them. Then there's the slight problem that if we had the tech, or aliens, to travel at the speed of light, roughly 90% of the universe is forever out of our reach and vice versa. There are also about 60 stars that could possibly host an intelligent civilization (dyson sphere stars). Two new papers were published this month about them. The first was about 7 red dwarf stars and the second is about the other 53. The 7 stars have extra infrared emissions that can't be explained with known natural causes. Then there are the 53. They fit our theoretical dyson sphere expectations. Scientists don't know what is causing the excess infrared heat. Hot, planet-forming debris disks (protoplanetary disks) are one possibility. The problem is most of the 60 stars are old. Any planet forming debris disks should have cooled and disappeared by now. There have also been areas in the universe that should have stars but don't, the stars have just disappeared. They plan to use JWST to look at them more soon.
"bit rot" on the internet is NOT a technical problem of "data degradation". It's a people problem where the servers or services hosting the websites are taken offline intentionally, because people stop paying for them to be online. It's a people problem, (and of course a money problem) not a technical problem. So your response didn't answer the question at all.
I became a little bored of the aurora borealis from flying frequently in the 1990s or so. I would take a red-eye flight each week for work. Flying from Oregon to the east coast from November through May would usually have the plane appear to be well _within_ the aurora looking out the airplane windows. They varied in color (magenta, yellow, orange, blue. and red) and extent of the atmosphere and were pretty amazing but it seemed no one else on the flights would pay much attention.
2:50 something I learned recently that kinda blew my mind is that most modern computer storage hardware isn’t designed for data retention in the long run…BUT, aparentky older computers hold up better and data is retained much longer than in newer systems (which periodically schedule to manage and prevent data decay). It almost feels like we found ourselves lucky enough that our oldest stuff held out long enough for us to realize in time that data retention is important and probably the old hardware has allowed for many successful data recoveries that may not be possible with our current hardware at such timescales.
I'm from California, and I do recommend driving Hwy 1 from end to end. Definitely make sure you give yourself plenty of time to do the journey right. Trust me on that. There are so many experiences to be savored along the way, and the driving itself is generally very active and requires a lot of concentration, so you're gonna want to take fairly frequent breaks to just chill and take everything in. I also recommend going from south to north so you conclude your adventure in the super laid-back and stunningly gorgeous North Coast, and you might as well continue on the very special stretch of 101 that runs deep through the sticks of northern CA up to Oregon (and get some of that incredible smoked fish from Paul's in Klamath!).
there's solid state battery pouches in limited testing productions, theres also graphien textiles with single strand to multiple for actual textiles (fabrics, meshes, 3d addetive print in place cables or tiny wireframes in the prints?), metal organic frameworks are being explored further (0 energy filtering process, salts "lithum" being the main one, h2o water filtration, etc etc..), project voxel storage explored data storage in 3 dimenions in a quartz medium, we have also unlocked two bands of prior issue prone "fiber wavelengths" that open the bandwidth sunami flood gates, and we are also exploring the voxel data storage in dvd media style as well 🎉🎉🎉🎉 alooots going on
The problem is that there's already been a large loss of digital information--so many early websites from the 90s and early 2000s and content from web services (AOL, Compuserve) are completely gone. The other issue that archivists are dealing with are how to keep digital formats readable for decades--think of data on a floppy disk and how much effort it would take now to get info off of a floppy disk. Also, file formats change over time and can become unreadable.
As one of those people who spent a LOT of time making sure that Y2K didn't happen (I wrote software that is used by banks, government, healthcare, and a host of other critical industries), THANK YOU for actually acknowledging our efforts to prevent what was a very real problem. I'll grant that the media over-dramatized the situation (by late 1999, we had long since addressed all critical systems and major media knew that), but I still want to punch my screen every time a presenter on here describes Y2K as a hoax.
BitRot-question - Yes, most information is digital now and all kinds of informationstorage has a risk of being destroyed resulting in loss of information. It will not be a sudden thing, but it is a process that is ongoing. Can you open a ZIP-archive on your computer today? Yes. Can you open a RAR-archive? No? It is an older archive type. Can you open a WordPerfect file and read it? It is possible to find only converters for it. What about an older obscure text-editor file that is in a copyrighted format? Probably not. This is how information will be lost. - Like not being able to read a floppydisk 5 1/4" on a modern computer. You can go full archeologist and find solutions, but sooner or later, you will lose information like fading old photos in your photoalbum.
They had a bunch of electrical stuff…Arc Lights, Telegraphs, Telegraph Printers, Electric Semaphore Signals for Trains, Burglar Alarms in big cities…Fire Telegraphs…so the Carrington Event made tons of havoc…
I also watched 3 Body Problem, and that thing with the wires destroying that ship and slicing everyone into bits, while disturbing, was quite cool at the same time.
To Nick the editor, nice work, some great easter eggs and refs in this one, gave me the giggles a few times. To Joe, Centralia is largely just a handful of roads and a bunch of empty lots with the remains of foundations, it's an eerie and ghostly town type of thing, minus the town part. Neat to see in person I suppose, then again, I used to live up that way and drive through it to get to other towns so many times maybe it just lost its allure for me, idk. Last time I went up that way, there was I think 2 houses left, that was quite a few years back, so I'm not sure even those last holdouts are still there.
I actually watched the 3 Body Problem because you mentioned it in some videos ago, now it becomes one of my favourite sci-fi series! The blinking stars scene made my jaw dropped, what an incredible mindboggling sight to see Now I'm planning to read book and watch the Tencent's version of the series 👍🏼 for recommendations, I recommend Undone, a two-season series from Prime, it's a sci-fi fantasy story, I gotta say it's about time travel? but presented in a whole new way, the rotoscoping animation is reallyy cool and the cast are also amazing, it has Bob Odenkirk and Rosa Salazar as a dad and daughter, what an incredible acting and story, loveee this series so much
@joescott if you're fascinated by Antarctica, I strongly recommend watching Antarctica: A Year On Ice. It's a documentary that covers one year of people's lives there in the main town. It's very interesting but also just beautiful. There's an ethereal, dark beauty about the place, like a part of earth that's still calm and natural. I have watched it already twice and I'm gonna watch it again soon.
*Loved the Salt Water Battery search segment!!!* That's just what an internet search/ rabbit hole feels like. When Joe does *humor* he's the best on TH-cam 24:55
17:42 The book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn is SO GOOD!! Its a trilogy actually, "My Ishmael" and "The Story of B".. they're all fantastically good, and yes, the Gorilla is the teacher.
I've been to Centralia! It's wild. It is closed off now but as a kid in Pennsylvania, we would drive through it on our way to Knoebles Grove amusement park. 10/10 recommend that park for anyone who finds themselves in that neck of the woods!!
Hey Joe, (where you going...) two things. 1. Fallout is fantastic. It catches the game very well, if that matters to you. 2. X-Men '97. Seriously. The first several episodes are fine, and reminded me of seeing the cartoon as a teen and enjoying it because I liked the comics and had nothing else going on, on a Saturday morning. But then. Joe. This unassuming cartoon? It KICKS THE DOOR DOWN AND SAYS "ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?!" It's good. They went from a fun cartoon to "hey, we know all those cute little filmmaking tricks you like" and it floors you. Very well done. At least watch it until you know what I'm talking about (and you will know) before you stop.
I've been to Centralia! It's super weird. I would suggest going in winter, seeing melted holes in the snow and then walking up to them to feel the heat coming out was very neat.
There is actually a new Y2K bug-like bug: the Y2038 problem. The way most systems fixed Y2K is to use a signed 32 bit binary integer to capture the seconds since Jan 1st 1970. At 3:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, they'll run out of bits. For the data rot problem you were talking about though, there are some cool advancements in etching data into glass and crystals. It's supposedly immune to data rot, doesn't need to be powered or kept at ideal temps, and doesn't need to be kept spinning like a HDD -- which means it generates less heat, and doesn't need AC like server farms today.
Bit rot will be a problem for more obscure information. Bit rot is easily avoidable for anything people actually pay attention to because making perfect digital copies is as easy as "save picture as." But the growing popularity of lost media shows that things can easily be forgotten if it's not on anyone's radar.
I LOVED ISHMAEL!!! I wrote that before I heard you say something about Star Trek. I keep seeing this ad that says, “Star Trek tells us that there will be a future.”. I find Star Trek so inspiring and helps calm my mind about the future.
I feel like modern bit rot is not about hard drives failing, it's more about economic effects and company decisions taking them offline on purpose. An easy example is that if you look at any thread on a forum site from the 90s or early 2000s there will be a ton of posts containing broken images, as the site hosting them is now long gone. Likewise with any links to other sites, the page it linked to is probably missing now. This is how information is lost now, it's explicitly taken offline.
@1:58 Thank you for mentioning that part. I still run into people who think that because nothing happened all the worry was for nothing. Meanwhile I vividly remember several overnights of patching BIOS' and updating pieces of software. Even some of the damn printers had to be patched.
12:36 there's a great picture of the milky way galaxy with a bubble showing how far our oldest transmissions have traveled by now and its absolutely tiny compared to the rest of the galaxy, let alone the universe. Even if there *were* other civilizations out there they wouldnt even be able to see us yet, let alone interact with us. So yea I think time is a major solution for the Fermi Paradox
I believe the first question on "bit rot" is not actual data degrading, but becoming unavailable because the service is gone. Any data behind the walled garden could be lost to users if it wasn't captured by the Wayback Machine or hosted elsewhere, but could live on if scanned by some large language model.
My issue with internet bit-rot is individuals and corporations removing the content from where it originally existed. It would of course still exist on archival sites but the ease of access to it goes away. The information remains but our ability to find it is rotting away
I heard somewhere that the best explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that EM communications just weakens until it just forms part of the CMB, only after a few tens of light years. So basically, we're all just too far away from each other to be able to hear one another.
I definitely think you should make a video about the game starfield, Bethesda (the company who made fallout and elder scrolls) literally collaborated with NASA and space X for the data on space. It’s one of my favorite games ever made, it’s truly a masterpiece and an incredibly accurate representation on space.
Bit rot and bit flips are mainly a problem for cold storage drives. On active drives, those errors are caught via parity bits and corrected quickly enough to be a nonissue for the most part. Additionally, any competent data management plan accounts for that issue via redundancy.
Yes, would love an update on salt batteries. I read about them a number of years back (I think it was AquaBattery from the University of Delft?). I haven't heard much since then and would love to hear more about how research into this technology has been going.
Fermi Paradox - totally agreed: I think the issue is time. Basically advanced civilizations, if they're out there, only produce a small bubble of information before they go away. That combined with the inverse square law, means that the window to capture an alien message is real slim. I also think life will be real common, and even what we would consider intelligent life will be relatively common (we have something like 5+ intelligent species on the planet right now - corvids, great apes, orcas, octopus, etc). I think technologically advanced civilizations will be extremely rare.
I love Love LOVE that the Three Seashells not only 1) show up as a reference in this video but also 2) you used a screen grab from Cyberpunk 2077. That little Easter egg had me on the floor laughing the first time I found it in Cyberpunk. In my old condo I put three sea shells on the bathroom sink. It was funny to me. :)
Joe, could you talk about burning plastics vs. pyrolysis of plastics--why the latter is not widely adopted, what calculation goes into it, and how we can get more pyrolysis going if that is a cleaner way of recycling?
I don't know how often you get time to read/listen to books, however, I have a recommendation based on your last lightning round question. The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton is a pretty good series that has the cure for aging as a good thing. Still plenty of drama, but I really like the premise of this series!
All right, the two Ballot Box topics were:
- Salt Water Batteries (a deeper dive)
- What Would Happen If A Solar Storm Kicked Us Back To The 90s?
Which would you rather see?
Solar storm!
Solar storm ☀️
Solar storm definitely!
I want to go back to the 90s!!
both!
4:44 Props to your editor for just putting a black screen when you mentioned you wanted to see the Mariana Trench. Solid dad joke.
Followed up nicely with The Outpost 31 pic for Antarctica 🤣
I laughed so hard at that
Why were the programmers wearing horizontal stripes? Prisoners wear horizontal stripes... Is that SUPPOSED TO BE a joke?... the judges say...."GOOD JOKE!"
The library of Alexandria, the loss of our ability to make Roman concrete until VERY recently, our inability to make Greek fire, and the delisting of computer games demonstrate that the loss of knowledge is absolutely something that is worth considering. That's why it is soo important to keep hard copies or multiple backups of everything that's important to you.
I was one of those Y2K techs. I patched hundreds of servers to be Y2K compliant. It ended up not being a problem, but yes, because everybody got on the ball and fixed it. I think the bit-rot comparison is more a question of corporations not being incentivized to actually provide protection to the information. Companies go out of business and short of the Internet Archive, which is currently under an existential threat, there's no guarantee big swaths of information and history being lost. We're also getting to the point where the crude AIs we have are going to flood the internet with garbage in pursuit of SEO. You can already see the effects and Google's new AI has been spouting garbage. So finding good information in a flood of garbage is an imminent problem.
the mona lisa is ephemeral
they all spout garbage. I was trying to look up information to help a customer with their computer problem. I go on HP's website where people were asking for help. I found they started using an ai bot to answer questions instead of having an actual person do it, and it was straight up LYING to people. telling people a device could do things when it couldn't, etc.
I'm a dev working for a high velocity algorithmic trading firm. I deal with 1-digit years all the time. Some exchanges use them in their symbols for products. Eg, EDZ5 is a Eurodollar futures contract that matures in December 2025. Or is it 2015, or 2005, or 1995, or...
I was at a Y2K party on Dec 31, 1999 and a friend noticed that the host was not patched on their personal computer. He telneted into this work server and got the BIOS patch for that motherboard, and fixed the issue with just moments to spare ! Then we all ran downstairs and did the midnight countdown with our watches which had been synchronized to atomic time ! Nothing happened. Good times !
Good that you mentioned that Y2K didn’t fix itself but was fixed through the hard work of many, many people. Great video. 😊
Fear mongering being spread by people who don't understand cloud architecture.
It sounds as if they think data is being stored in actual clouds and not in some physical 100 hectare warehouse.
Yes. far too many people treat Y2K like it was the next war of the worlds broadcast, or 2012/may 2005 conspiracy theory.
Bill Clinton was actually annoyed with how people treated that. I remember a late night talk show interview with him in the mid to late 2000s where the host had brought it up, and he went on a kind of mini rant over how it was a very real danger and how much work people put into making sure the predictions DIDN'T come true. it was part of a greater conversation with stuff like foiled terrorist attacks and things like that. IE that people assume there was no danger because nothing bad happened.
I know I was getting ready to march down to the comments and write a semi angry comment 😂
Yes I spent months fixing y2k bugs at work which would have caused chaos then had to prove to auditors that the software was good! Definitely lots of hard work around the world fixed it!
Wasn’t this what they were doing in the movie Office Space?
Been listening to your videos all morning. It’s produced some interesting questions from my granddaughter.
Just wanted to say thanks for producing interesting, fact based videos in a format that is kid friendly. No cursing, no graphic description of things that would give her nightmares.
We had a very interesting discussion about why certain people didn’t think other people could build things like the pyramids and thought it was space aliens. A seven year olds perspective is interesting and I’m finding more about how she thinks.
Thanks again!
If natural death no longer existed, can you imagine how incredibly tragic accidental deaths would become? I imagine the world becoming oppressively risk averse rather rapidly.
Population would be a bigger issue, it would surprise you how fast it would happen too. Millions of people are born every day. I doubt we could solve it fast enough.
@@Sundablakr And even if we did some half life contraception type stuff, who knows what that would do to us culturally since new generations aren't being born (if this happened 1700s for example slavery would have a good chance of still being around). I really just don't think it'd be good for us as a species to achieve immortality yet.
Not only incredibly tragic, but also successively more likely the longer you live. Even if we assume that the probability of lethal accident (or other circumstances resulting in the same outcome, like "encounters" or illness) does not exceed a certain small amount of, say, 0.1% for every given year (or even decreases due to increased risk adversity), the numbers would still add up over longer and longer lives. We basically would still have a finite life expectancy due to it becoming ever more likely that something will get us eventually.
@@Sundablakr A huge driving force of having children is actually the rather short time span in which women can bear children. If by curing aging we also eliminate menopause, there suddenly wouldn't be a reason to have children "now" rather than "eventually". Combined with an increase in risk adversity the OP already suggested (and childbirth is still not completely risk free), we would probably see birth rates doing a literal nose dive.
@@lonestarr1490 Honestly, given a world population that until relatively recently had been soaring, and the impact of more and more humans on the environment, I'm not so sure that would be a bad thing. I can imagine a LOT of people would put off having children if they knew they could have healthy children later, and consequently they'd probably be better educated, wiser etc. when they had their first child and likely better parents vs. somebody having their first kid at 16, not being able to properly financially, emotionally or educationally support that child etc.
That salt water battery segment was well edited. Thanks Nick😂
Nick worked some magic
A Joe fever dream, just what I always wanted
Well if Matt Ferrell covered it, I can guarantee that technology is pure hype and vaporware.
@@nitehawk86 Sodium-ion batteries are in production already. But I think that is not the same as "salt water" batteries.
That was genuinely hilarious!!
Seeing the Northern Lights was a bucket list thing for me, but I never thought I would actually get to see them. I recently moved to northern canada, but not far enough north to see them. I am pretty sure this is as far north as I am going to get, so I resigned myself that it just wasn't gonna happen. Then this event happened, and as I walked out onto my balcony I watched the entire sky light up with my wife. We were gobsmacked and stared at it for almost an hour. We took videos and were amazed at how much more vivid and stunning it appeared through the lense of the camera. Awe inspiring... and it felt amazing to check something off a list I thought would never happen. Awesome.... literally the first truly Awesome thing I have ever seen.
You watched the sky light up with your wife? I've GOT to move to Canada...
I hate that everybody saw colors 😅 i looked at it for an hour and for a good 20 min it was pulsating like crazy. But it was all gray
If you can't see the auroras on a somewhat regular basis you have not moved to northern Canada. lol
@@davidpetersen1 lol fair enough. Pretty dang cold tho.
@@Jostradomas Lol.. where are you?
An easy example of bit rot in my experience is internet forums. I've been a member of a couple and am aware of many others that are just not around any longer. Like so many spoken words without a permanent record, everything or nearly everything posted to those forums is now gone. You might find some captures on the Internet Archive or some such, but they will be snapshots that typically won't even include the thread contents, and they many, many pages of threads will also be largely if not entirely inaccessible, as will be the user account pages and everything else. The web is not permanent, and given that it relies on many interconnected computer systems just to exist, it will likely not even outlast books and other physical media. At some point, some event will destroy more bits and more archives of bits. It is all as impermanent as the civilization that created it.
"the internet never forgets"
Not only bit rot - how many forum threads where crucial components are gone because fomains were not maintaned and links lead to nothing or image hosts shut down.
The reliance on clouds, dervices that could change at any time, sometimes with no real feasible alternatives.
Bancruptcy or a malicious attack, and exabytes are gone.
Subscription based movies and series, never on physical media, shelved, forgotten and deleted, if not ripped and maintained by digital robin hoods...
This isn't something a patch can fix like in Y2Ks case.
The "Gateway to Hell" is a tourist trap. No Prince of Darkness. No eternally tortured souls. Big ripoff
Is Buffy at least hanging around near there somewhere?
Not super recent, but the best sci fi show in the last 10 years in my opinion is The Expanse
It may not be for everybody but for me it's the best sci fi show of the last decade by FAR.
Yup definitely suggest he watches it
@@Whitespliff That's not saying much tbh
I like the 3 Body Problem
I am FINALLY, after 2 years, finishing the Wheel of Time book series and then... off into The Expanse!!! I have purposely kept myself in the dark about the series and I am so pumped to start!
What I find really interesting will be that say 1000 years from now people will be able to watch high quality videos going back 1000 years. Being able to watch news clips, entertainment bits, historical events that took place eons ago. It would be like US being able to watch the news from 1024 AD. That is something that people of the future will take for granted.
That's a very interesting perspective. Lucky bastards 😂
except that there is already video that has disappeared and the way things are going more is going to disappear due to insane IP protections.
It is actually kinda hard, at least for me, to find news broadcast from the past. Certainly they are out there, but not a heck of a lot. Try picking a random date and searching for a news broadcast. EDIT: Actually, I just checked and it is better than it used to be. 😁
Damn that's a crazy thought
Oh! Now that is an awesome thought! I'm always more pessimistic about it. I always think about all the things I will miss after I die, mostly I'm worried about not getting to be in nature anymore. I can't imagine not hearing birds and bugs, and all the trees and plants. It just super sucks that all that will go away someday for us all. Lol soooo sorry for that bummer of a comment!
My dad used to work for TXU Energy (back then, it was TU Electric) in the 90s and early 00s. I remember him working a lot of overtime to get everything prepared and configured in the year leading up to the new year. Always makes me roll my eyes when people say Y2K wasn't a big deal and nothing bad happened
Basically the same thing as with climate change: if nothing awfully happens, people will say it ain't so bad, completely neglecting the amount of work do many other people put in.
@@lonestarr1490 People of Florida: "We can't insure our homes because of sea level rise and more powerful storms!" Florida's governor: "I'm going to ban any consideration of climate change and the term itself from our laws." (facepalm)
Y2K was a real pita. Lots of product testing, a few products patched, and a shitload of paperwork.
So what was the problem with Y2K?
@@deadly_dave Somebody with way more knowledge than I should elucidate and clarify, but what I recall was a concern about the way date data, specifically the year portion, would be dealt with, because the 1 in 1999 did not need to be stored, as there were no computers in 999. But with Jan 1, 2001, suddenly all 4 digits needed to be stored, and weird things might happen otherwise, like subtraction between two dates to get an age give a negative number.
I’ve gone about halfway of the 1 in california. The most important thing to note if you’re going to drive it is go south. If you’re driving north, you’re going to see mostly rock. South you’ll be able to see the shoreline and no one will be in your way.
I’ve been a UI/UX developer for 15 years. The internet has become a lot less useful and usable in the last 15 years despite our combined efforts to integrate more accessibility features into the web. I can barely look at most sites because of the amount of ads on my phone. Yet another area we have focused more on making money than making something better.
you seem like such a chill guy honestly your whole approach is just comfy and welcoming part of why i watch. the other part is cool topics like this one.
As for the hotel in "So I Married An Axe Murderer", the bad news is its not really a hotel. The good news is its actually called the Dunsmuir Estate, located in Oakland, CA, and its available to rent for special events (and other film shoots including "View To A Kill" and "Phantasm") Its also open to the public on occasion for various city and holiday events.
Why would you know that?
@@benjamindover4337 I grew up in San Leandro, right next to Oakland, and went up there numerous times. It was always fun to spot the house in various films.
@@benjamindover4337 Bro wtf is your youtube bio i accidentally clicked your name and that shit made me crack tf up 😭
“Heeeeed! Paper! Now!”
@@TelepathicRabbit oh, so you don't find it the least but suspicious that he knows so much about the place?
Three Body Problem has a bit on 'bit rot'. In the end they figured out that literally carving their history into Pluto (iirc) was the longest term storage media they could make. Even with a few hundred years of tech over us.
CDs/DVDs do eventually decay. Same for SSDs and HDDs, though those go faster. Even paper decays on a long enough timeline even in a near-vacuum.
Plus with digital storage you have to worry about format. Basically you gotta include a working laptop that has instructions on how to use it printed nearby, and then more instructions on all the file formats and data storage techniques used. Then somehow keep the laptop battery in good enough condition for it to work.
There's the millennium clocks and 'Clock of the Long Now' which is similar to this but with time itself.
Over 10 years ago there were reports at attempts to put digital information into glass crystals that would last for a minimum of 5,000 years. Not sure what happened to that.
In any case our information shared on the Internet is repeated over and over again now. So even if the original source is lost the knowledge itself isn't. It's not like back in the day when most people were illiterate and the only source of knowledge was the 1 book that 1 guy wrote and possibly ended up in the library of Alexandria.
Without being too morbid, the way We're going, our information could outlast us with no One to make use of it, making it useless anyway.
Oh and a quick shout out to my r/w cd and floppy disk somewhere with my old CV stored.
I think we could figure out some basics of innate human linguistic patterns, but the inverse problem is our making assumptions from that which WON'T apply to others or perhaps even people in the future. If you use physics and chemistry (for example), you then require your future audience to have that literacy. I suppose the simplest way would be mathematics and you would have to teach to them the language as you go. The simplest way is hard 😂
I’ve heard the idea of putting a satellite with everything stored on it in a Lagrange point, to give it the best chances of survival through deep time.
In The Expanse, someone built a computer the size of Jupiter then parked it around a star and emptied the rest of the matter from the solar system (I think that’s right, it’s been a while)
Honestly it kind of feels like a non-problem to me. For a lot of things, it's *nice* but not *necessary* to have original copies still around. The knowledge is the knowledge, it doesn't need to be on the original vellum, paper, stone, or hard disc.
So we just keep doing what we're doing now - copying our knowledge onto a new sheet of paper, a new disc, a new stone. Updating the language to make sense to the current readers, and enough sense to immediate-future generations that they can translate it into their own vernacular as well. We also keep copies of the original language, of course. But you read a textbook on optic from the 1860s, 1960s, today, and 2060s and (even ignoring improvements in what we know) the language is much different to reflect the usage and language of the day, even if the information is the same.
Of course, it doesn't really help if there's a sudden disjoint in humanity - like an apocalypse, or all our machine data getting wiped in a solar storm (although we're mostly hardened against that for the truly important information). But in a "business as usual" situation, while it's *nice* to have durable data storage, I don't think it's apocalypse-causing in and of itself for us to not have it.
@@hypotheticalaxolotl This is a major issue with dealing with very long term toxic waste, e.g. depleted nuclear fuel. How do you leave a message saying "Don't dig here, it will kill you."
I'm British and we have done highway one in California. I did it with my wife a few years ago, it was great, Pizmo beach was a lovely chill place to hang out, everyone should do that trip.
Ishmael was such a great book. It was given to me and I gave it to a friend. Then I bought a new copy, read it again, then gave it to a friend. Repeated this process a few times now.
Check out some of Daniel Quinn's other books- they all follow the same themes of philosophy, existence, and thought, but focus on separate subjects in those areas and are entertaining stories as well.
We had to join the lists for SAA during grad school and data (especially context) is lost every time data is migrated. It is a big deal for archivists. Preserving the most content and context as data is migrated to prevent AI hallucinations influencing common knowledge is one of the new concerns.
I haven't heard of any of those SciFi shows you mentioned in the last question. I stopped paying for cable TV in 2005 and have only used the Internet for "TV" ever since. Nowadays all my watching is on TH-cam (with a family Premium subscription). With so many great channels like Joe Scott, I'm fulfilled. I see no "need" to keep up with popular shows.
Same!
TH-cam + BitTorrent + vpn = All the Entertainment I need. Cost?...$3/month
Amen!
I stopped paying for cable in 2016. MSNBC I watch on TH-cam and the NFL is on network TV, and baseball is on the radio or on text on my phone. And I'm not big into basketball and hockey. And really there's nothing else I miss from cable.
TH-cam videos are what I watch when I'm bored at work. Otherwise, I don't consume any video media.
My media consumption tanked after I divorced and realized that was something I did with her, not something I did for myself.
re: the fermi paradox question, your perspective is one that i also hold in my cloud of possibilities when it comes up but i heard a fantastic take from a speaker on the event horizon podcast who summed it up perfectly by saying, in extreme short form to his answer 'no one is talking to you yet because you're only assuming you're interesting and maybe you're really not' and that has become my favorite so far. it's not positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic for the probability of us making contact or why we haven't. it's the exact logic for why somebody living with 8billion other people might not have any freinds. and that's the most grounded and believable answer i've heard so far. "existing" doesn't guarantee you an invite to the party much less a date. and i think people find that depressing.
I used a friend who did research into battery technology. He got badly burnt when molten salt/sulphur battery he was addressing blew up. This was back in the seventies. His first job was working as Stirling Moss' mechanic. Miss you Mike.
I think you misunderstood Hendrick's question. I'm a computer scientist so I'll pretend to be an authoritative source until some other comment corrects me.
Digital storage mediums are fundamentally different to traditional ones. While carvings in stone or writing on paper will (more or less) survive so long as they are not directly damaged, digital storage 'rots' over time in a unique way such that the device itself can be flawless but the contained data will independently degrade. ZFS/BTRFS/your favourite server grade file system is periodically reading (scrubbing) the data to detect correctable errors, but then also _rewriting_ it so it's as if the data is new. There's no such thing as bit rot in the cloud because the data never actually sits that long before it's refreshed. Under the most ideal conditions, the data on a disconnected HDD/SSD/tape will only last tens of years.
The concern with respect to the death of the internet is that even if you somehow download everything first, you cannot simply throw it in a vault---it inherently requires infrastructure on the scale of said dying internet to maintain it which is contradictory to the whole death thing. We taught rocks to think yet their memory is also use it or lose it. The only real long-term solution is to unironically write the ones and zeros on paper or some equivalent (long live punch cards
It doesn't help that Data migration causes degradation in content and risks corruption. even if we find a way to preserve it much of the context is lost and it gets increasingly confusing. Then again I got my MLIS archives specialty in 2016, cloud storage has improved and decreased some issues with data migration. But every time a doc is converted there is a risk of losing important info.
yeah, this is a tough concept.
i know magnetic tape can hold data for ages, but even that has bit rot, right?
@@UsahMahin every time data is saved or backed up, even automatically, there is a risk of data corruption. Errors can occur and there isn't a way to just unsave a damaged file. You have to hope the original is still viable. So if a system auto updates to prevent unauthorized access or just because systems are constantly changing, to keep the info accessable you risk making it unusable.
@@UsahMahin that may not be the exact reason OP meant, but that is just what I can contribute as an archivist. Not necessarily a computer science experiment. I have an info science degree, not computer science.
Going past data degradation, part of the idea of the original question came from people who had been around in the early days of the internet and noted that some places they used to visit and maybe even had bookmarked as a resource would disappear as people stopped maintaining them. Sure, a lot was Geocities quality and probably not a great loss to civilization, but maybe some was? There is also the problem of good data being buried by trash data as we produce more and more information. As Sagan said, not all bits of data have the same value. Combine that with the deterioration of search engines in favor of sponsored ads, the potential for some "good stuff" to be lost is pretty good. And as the original question mentioned, that which might be trained on before being lost by LLMs and the like would be a ghost memory of something, possibly not keeping the entirety of context.
Everytime I plan to watch something new I'm reminded of an old series that I suddenly have to rewatch and I completely forget about the new show.
Just finished SG1 for the umpteenth time and I don't regret it at all.
Stargate series along with the short lived Firefly series are my favorite.
I also go back to SG1 and watch them all again, along with Atlantis. One can only hope now that Amazon owns MGM that we can get a new project in the vain of SG1.
Always here for SG-1
You will never regret rewatching SG1!
I recently sat down and started to watch Farscape for the first time.
I'm six episodes in, and I'm struggling with it.
I don't mind the Muppets -- those are incredibly well done.
But I really have a tough time with Crichton.
The guy is *supposed* to be an *astronaut* -- literally, the best person out of two to four million people -- and he keeps making *inexcusably stupid* decisions.
Sometimes, it's just painful to watch -- but I stick with it because it's supposed to improve tremendously after the first season, and some of my friends swear by it.
I dunno, though.... 😣
My vote goes for the Salt Water Batteries. :)
the ballot is at the top of the comment section (pinned)
I’m an Aussie..
So yes…
Let’s vote for saltwater batteries…
I’m kinda hopeful for this technology
BATTERIES
Your comment about sticky is funny. I just got done chatting with a friend about a similar question and my assessment is that based on how many extinction level events we have had on this planet. When life finds a way it's going to be a hard timing getting rid of it. Something will persist and evolve even on a sing cell level.
My favorite for the Drake Equation/Fermi Paradox question is the Dark Forrest and Grabby Aliens hypotheses, compounded by what I've heard referenced as the "Dinosaur Problem".
For us, the animals which have shown a predilection towards intelligence have all been mammals (aside from some questionable conclusions about octopuses). Mammals filled an ecological niche towards the end of the dinosaur era around that of squirrels, shrews, and such. I find it unlikely that we have just missed every mammal bigger than that size in the fossil record.
So, the dinosaur problem is basically getting the metabolism and calorie requirements that seem to be needed in order to develop intelligence. It's hard to get large enough to push toward intelligence when all the ecological niches that would allow the size needed already filled with relatively predatory species.
Well done, Nick, making the research sequence interesting!
Fallout is worth the hype. It's not a huge time commitment and it is extraordinarily well done.
Agreed! I've never played any of the games and I still really enjoyed watching the show. Joe Scott definitely should watch it.
Surprisingly well done. It incorporates aspects of all the video games really well. Really feels like just another story in that world.
Meh, it's average at best
these people are shills
Too much AI. Kind of boring too and doesnt have a pace that makes sense for those who haven’t played the games.
Your video "Contact was wrong" did a great job of explaining why we haven't heard anyone and why no one has heard us. My answer for the Fermi Paradox is the ridiculous scale of the universe.
Well, kinda. The Fermi paradox, at least originally, is not exactly about making contact or hearing someone, but about finding any form of trace of intelligent, space faring life. The amount of time the universe already exists for would have been more than sufficient for any species capable of leaving its home world to colonize the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy. So it's not so much about someone seemingly not being anywhere, but about them obviously not being literally everywhere.
@@lonestarr1490
We lack the ability to properly see the Universe we do know about....
@@lonestarr1490 It may be that space travel is astonishingly hard.
For example if the planet is more than twice the size of Earth: reaching escape velocity with a rocket is impossible.
@@lonestarr1490 I mean, it would only take a civilization 200 thousand years to colonize the Milky Way, our galaxy, with sublight technology going 90% the speed of light.
With how old our galaxy is, and how many planets there are, you'd expect at least one of them to have a civilization that's got a measly 1 million years ahead of us. Considering our galaxy is estimated to be over 2 billion years old, it's weird we see no one out there colonizing or building galactic megastructures, as you'd expect.
Personally I think our own species is only a few centuries away from interstellar travel, like the nearest star systems would only take about 15 years to reach at 30% the speed of light, which should be doable in the near future.
@@lonestarr1490 it could also be that a more intelligent species would see us as so primitive as to have no value to their society, like apes are to us, and have left us to our own devices to quietly study our society. No idea tho this is total conjecture just my personal theory. :)
@joescott Thank you so much for recognicing that the reason we didn't have a Y2K problem, was because a huge number of people worked tirelessly to avoid it.
I so often hear the Y2K problem used in the context of worrying for nothing, so it's nice to see some reocgnition of the huge amount of work people did.
In the '70s my dad made a battery with coins of different metals with paper in between that was soaked in salt water.
That gives a whole new meaning the words "assalt and battery".
Pretty sure bitrot is specific to storage media. It seems like the person thought all data just spontaneously deteriorates, which is not the csse. That's why there's hierarchy of media for storage purposes and why very important stuff is still written to magnetic tape. SSDs are most vulnerable, which is why you see people usually utilize standard spinning hard drives in nas devices.
That.. though data can also rot on active devices as files are copied and errors are accidentally introduced. It's rare, but it happens.
Alternatively, sites like TH-cam will re-encode old videos to make them playable on new devices and software versions, degrading the quality in the process.
Or the experience may degrade even if the data is intact: old video games don't look right unless they're played on period correct CRT displays, for example.
No, entropy happens to all things. The timescales can vary widely, and it's true that ssds < hard drives < tapes, but tapes degrade too. Paper degrades. The state of the art right now is glass, but even that has a (n estimated) shelf life of "only" a few hundred million years.
@@jxtq27Where have you heard of glass?? It's metallic coated magnetic tape that's used by arctic world archive
@@helmaschine1885 Well I don't seem to be able to post a link but Microsoft has project silica. They're only claiming 10000 years though. I'll keep searching for the original article that I'm pretty sure made a much larger claim, but wanted to give you something to answer your question even though it's not the sensational claim from my first comment. Maybe some entropy slipped into my brain.
How do you know this!!? Impressive. I have never even thought about this as a thing and here you are: an expert who works in a field I never knew existed.
Unfortunately, all the Star Trek stuff is locked away behind a relatively obscure pay wall now where it will become significantly less a part of our social fabric than it once was.
I love startrek but I did not understand what you meant here could you please elaborate?
@@spark_coder I think the only way to watch any Star Trek series now is to pay for Paramount's streaming thing so a lot fewer people will be seeing it, which is a shame.
Pretty sure he is referring to Star Trek being included on Paramount+. Meaning you have to subscribe to watch it.
yarrrr
There saying 60s and 90s Trek was broadcast (with ads) for free, and everyone had a TV and lots of people watched it... where as today you have to pirate or subscribe to a service, so media is less unified, more niche, and sometimes behind a paywall - so less people are watching specific things. Meaning where as Star Trek was a cultural touchstone in the past - modern Trek likely won't be recalled or considered with the same level of familiarity or sentimentality.
The Expanse. Outstanding show!
This, although it ended a bit ago now. More recently, "Silo" is really quite good.
ReFS is not a replacement for NTFS, and it is in fact missing a huge amount of features from NTFS that Microsoft is not planning to port at all.
ReFS is basically meant for server workloads and specially development environments because it has way more modern and efficient file system filters than NTFS as well as some unique interactions with other systems such as Windows Defender and Windows Search Indexing that mitigate the pitfalls of anthill tools (lots of tiny files) like Git and NPM. The most obvious dead away is that the only official way to format a volume as ReFS right now is by creating what Windows calls a "development drive" from the Developer section of the Settings app in Windows 11 Pro for Workstations and Windows 11 Enterprise.
An idea for a video...
Cover how language can dictate our personalities and how we percieve things as well as how language effects a society on the level of a country with one dominant language and how it compares to a country who's inhabitants speak numerous different languages. Then how language over time changes and how that effects us as well. The film "arrival" is such a crazy topic. How the lead character starts to percieve the past, future, and present more and more as she begins to understand the aliens way of communicating. I think you may have briefly touched down on it but it's such a crazy thing I think it deserves a good video on it.
The Fermi Paradox isn't about why others can't hear us. Which our time thing would be an explanation for.
It's why we can't hear others, with the argument being that we only took 4 billion years from earth cooling down to being on the cusp of space expansion, which will eventually get to be galactic.
That's nothing on the galactic time scale. Why aren't there more that were around earlier?
The point remains that us humans have only had the technology to send signals into space for 100 years and since then have moved on to signals that will be very hard to identify as human broadcast from deep space. Modern broadcasting looks a lot like noise unless you know exactly what you are looking for, so mix that in lots of background noise and those aliens wouldn't consider this planet as "broadcasting" anymore. And assuming also aliens will have gone through similar evolution, it means we can only recognize them during those 100 years they were analog broadcasting and that's a tiny blip that needs to match the window we have to receive them at the distance we are from them. Detecting stuff like Dyson spheres might be more likely ... 7 observed candidates I heard a recent paper claimed ...
@@MisterkeTube I was just explaining the fermi paradox, because I made the same false assumption about what the paradox was about.
The Galaxy has planets likely around 12-13 billion years old.
The Galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide (which is wide, yes, but not billions).
If we assume that the first planets could support life (doubtable), and that life could be spacefaring, and that they were on the literal polar rim of the galaxy, they could make it across the entire galaxy, only averaging 7-8k miles per hour.
For reference, the Parker Solar Probe reaches 430k miles per hour.
That's where the fermi paradox come from.
For further exploration: If we had a Parker Solar Probe spend half its time cruising at that speed, and half its time colonizing, we could spread through the entire galaxy in around 312 million years, on current propulsion technology.
With the galaxy's planets being up to 13 billion years old, that's basically nothing.
There are solutions: Particularly named Great Filters.
Yeah, Joe touched a bit on this.
The fact that our present and even the last century, is an infinitesimal small time compared to the age of the universe.
Personally I mostly agree with him on this but also want to add that our technology is still relatively new and we're really expecting too much given the scale of space and our current scientific and technological knowledge.
So the reason we haven't heard anyone is because we've barely looked. It's like someone going outside their rural house, not seeing anyone and shouting 'where is everyone' and then automatically declaring they're the only person on earth because they hear nothing back.
When the fact is, maybe we just can't hear each other or they don't want to talk to us.
The former being more likely than the latter imho.
@@desperado3236 Again. That's not really the question. It's that the time to colonize the galaxy is so insignificant compared to the life of the galaxy, that we should already be surrounded.
It's why the equation doesn't include "time to evolve intelligence." It's "what percentage of life evolves intelligence?" Because the time aspect is so insignificant, compared to what has already passed.
Now, where you would progress from there is the topic of Filters. Like, perhaps the early planets simply lacked the necessary ingredients for (intelligent) life. The galaxy was also much more.. active... the further back you go. If you think space is hostile now, you'd be shocked by what it was back then.
Then, once you factor in filters, things make much more mathematical sense.
I think an important point is that on Earth, a paradise compared to most of the planets we've discovered, it took 4 billion years of relative stability for life to develop to the point where it can send and receive signals. This is why time is part of the answer.
Nick did well, i laughed during the saltwater bit.
I've always wondered... I'm not worried about the data itself degrading.. I'm worried about having a working machine that can read the data. Imagine if you had to retrieve the world's knowledge from well preserved VHS tapes, but no one makes functioning VCRs anymore or even knows how to. I know there's still working VCRs today, but what about 100 years from now?
Joe, sci-fi has addressed so many of these ideas in so many different ways. Long life: I recommend reading The City And The Stars by ACClarke, which was written 70 years ago, and addresses the idea of extremely long-lived humans. (Item - when you meet someone else who lives 1000y, it's considered rude to spend less than half of a day on personal greetings and catching up!) Me, I'd selfishly love to live on and on, /with no further physical or mental degradation only/, to take up all of the hobbies, arts, skills, etc. that pique my interest.
The coolest use of AI I have found personally is a DAW called RIPX that uses AI to analyze music and separate the sounds into different instrument layers. Which is allowing me to remove undesired sounds from the mix in old songs I lost the save files for over the early years of music production. Soon I will be able to improve and finish a ton of song Ideas that were otherwise lost to time at the hands of glaring flaws.
I’ve heard good things about the Expanse show.
Expanse is terrific. More of a hard science sci-fi too. There are also subtle nods to Joe's boy, Andy Weir in it.
@@johnnycandles8675 and I haven’t watched it myself, just heard that it’s good. (Nor have I read the books, and I ain’t got much of an excuse for that. Just lack of motivation for all of it…)
@@johnnycandles8675 Well, hard ish, kinda, somewhat, in the books. A little less in the show, if I remember correctly (for example, I'm pretty sure they had space sound effects; also, they skimped on some of the concepts of the books, probably for budget reasons). But it's still another league than ... well, most of the rest out there.
It's not bad, but can be kinda hard to get into because you have to endure one of the most annoying, oblivious, self-righteous made-hero-by-circumstances fumbduck sonny boy non-character MCs out there for a looong time ... before he eventually matures into an actual person.
You should read the books, too. The show diverges enough from the source material to enjoy both like they were different interpretations of the same thing, if that makes any sense.
@@keinschwein8467 wasn’t Luke Skywalker like that once too? And what makes the books different from the show?
The idea of losing all of humanity's most important information is a very real possibility if it is only saved electronically.
The idea of a reset of all electronic technology is an even more realistic possibility.
Definitely worth an episode
we would revert to back to the 90's. Most places were mostly paperless by 2004. My local Main library still does microfilm newspapers at least.
think how much carbon capture to back it all up to paper books...
Mighty Joe Young, memory unlocked!!!
Spot on for the drake/Fermi issue. Each civilization even if it survived for centuries is still such a small blip in time and as you say we have to be looking at the right spot at the right time, quite a challenge. I think it would be quite a thing for us to actually find something even in a "teeming" universe as space and time are sooooooooooooooooooooooo huge, really beyond what an individual can actually conceptualize (may as just say infinite for our small brains) and we are but a microscopic speck on the whole thing.
The Demolition Man reference is great, but the whole "Every restaurant is TacoBell" quote is grand, but how about the other add placements that were changed in the movie. TacoBell was replace on a video version and a TV version of the movie with Pizza Hut, due to digital overlay. Although the two franchises are owned by the same mother company, it's still a crazy thing that a lot of people don't even notice and it actually happens more than they think. Like a purposeful Mandela effect. Do a video on that subject Joe. It's a huge conspiracy that no one is talking about. It's basically how they change history without big resistance...
I have spoken...
Captain out...
i think Joe missed the point of the question on bit rot. And Joe is not at all wrong in his answer btw. But there's a specific nuance to this which i believe the question was trying to get at. i'll use 2 examples to better explain the guy's point:
1. Say that sometime in the future, the game devs of Minecraft decide to permanently close their servers (unless you have a private server, i dunno how that works). Now, apart from all the people losing their worlds that they've made inside the game, there are a lot of people who have passed on and their MC world is left as a legacy of their life and time here. So, maybe you can salvage your MC world idk. But what about the world's of those people who are now dead? *How do we preserve that?* We lose all the inner worlds from people who can no longer show their worlds.
2. And this is my literal nightmare so here it goes: EU has this law which is called Right To Forget or something like that. It basically means that without someone actively maintaining their site/account in a social media, they will lose everything because the sites will automatically delete it after a set amount of time. Previously it was 2 years and now it's 1 year i think. But, we know that there are TONS of people who are no longer alive, but had created sites and say.. tumblr posts talking about their world, their life stories, many have written biographies in their site, etc. *HOW DO WE PRESERVE THAT??*
Again, so many unsaid voices will be lost forever. Those sites and posts might be that person's late remaining legacy on this planet (Yes. There are cases like that.) But those are probably already gone. i know for a fact that 3 of my friends who are no longer with us, their accounts are managed by their next of kin. But what happens after a while? If it's no longer possible for them to actively keep it up? Will my friends be forgotten forever?
So, it's more like, what can we do to preserve these individual stories. They're not "famous" people. So that mean they deserve to be forgotten? Only famous people can be remembered? The modern world has supposedly tried to change that, but now, we've back tracked. How do we save the collective humanity?
You're totally right here... even without the EU laws, companies were not going to host things forever. I think the best answer we have to this right now is the Internet Archive. I don't think the policy issues here are clear cut -- it's a problem, to be sure. I think the right to be forgotten is important in the short term, but for the long term, generations after we pass away, that we owe them what I guess would be a "right to remember". (IIRC the Internet Archive's approach is to archive but keep private things they aren't allowed to share, so that it'll be available to future anthropologists and historians.)
@@_iarna_ Thank you for sharing!! Does IA store a person's internet blog? If so, can a dead person's last surviving thoughts, notes be uploaded there without being removed for being obscure or not worthy of the greater society?
Yeah i also think right to forget works for ridding bot accounts, etc. but ultimately it does more harm.
You can't mandate others to do this for you. If this is something you think is worth doing, you'll have to DIY. Maybe once you get your methods and systems down, you can share that, and others who would want to do the same, will be able, because of your work. And i'm betting that would earn you a bit of legacy, if you did it.
However, unfortunately, we'll all be forgotten someday... or worse: remembered incorrectly, because a false image of who you were, is useful to someone else.
Ah, The Ghost and the Internet. The little known sequel to the Ghost and Mrs Muir.
That is a deep cut right there
Vastly underrated show😊
I feel like curing aging would result in a serious generational wealth issue, involving nepotism, inheritance, influence, interest, etc. "You have to know somebody to get a job," but going back twenty generations on some ancient Montague / Capulet beef.
We'd overpopulate the world long before that happened, especially with multiple religions being against planning / contraceptives.
Looking forward to having you here. Best regards from Iceland 🇮🇸
Centrailia isn't really anything anymore. It's like an abandoned area, some abandoned areas and houses, an abandoned highway area, but they have mostly blocked, destroyed, or cleaned things. You can go down the hill one way and there is old houses in a living town or go the other way and there is a mall area with delicious coal fired pizza.
I think Joe just solved the Fermi paradox, like the explanation makes so much sense it feels dumb that it's even considered a paradox. It really is just time.
The Fermi paradox is deeper than us not finding them or them not finding us. If there was a successful technological species out there somewhere, it's reasonable to assume they would have mastered energy production on a stellar scale, or higher. Within the lifetime of a star, there's plenty of time to colonize a significant portion of the galaxy. All of that development would have indelible effects on the observable sky. Yet there is nothing out there that we've seen that appears to have an artificial origin. Furthermore, even though we've only been broadcasting for a century or so, the "red edge" biosignature of Earth has been announcing life since before our species existed. If advanced intelligence was out there, they would already know about us. So then does that imply they're not out there? Or intentionally hiding? Or so psychologically alien that somehow they have advanced technology but no curiosity? Hence the paradox?
@@aelolul I think one of the issues that may cause any intelligent lifeforms to not discover us could be the fact if they are more than 4.5 bly away, looking in our solar system, the Earth wouldn't exist. Over 2/3rd of the universe would not even know Earth is a planet. We are invisible to anyone looking from that distance. We probably have the same issue, looking at other star systems and determining there are no habital planets in them. Then there's the slight problem that if we had the tech, or aliens, to travel at the speed of light, roughly 90% of the universe is forever out of our reach and vice versa. There are also about 60 stars that could possibly host an intelligent civilization (dyson sphere stars). Two new papers were published this month about them. The first was about 7 red dwarf stars and the second is about the other 53. The 7 stars have extra infrared emissions that can't be explained with known natural causes. Then there are the 53. They fit our theoretical dyson sphere expectations. Scientists don't know what is causing the excess infrared heat. Hot, planet-forming debris disks (protoplanetary disks) are one possibility. The problem is most of the 60 stars are old. Any planet forming debris disks should have cooled and disappeared by now. There have also been areas in the universe that should have stars but don't, the stars have just disappeared. They plan to use JWST to look at them more soon.
"bit rot" on the internet is NOT a technical problem of "data degradation". It's a people problem where the servers or services hosting the websites are taken offline intentionally, because people stop paying for them to be online. It's a people problem, (and of course a money problem) not a technical problem. So your response didn't answer the question at all.
I became a little bored of the aurora borealis from flying frequently in the 1990s or so. I would take a red-eye flight each week for work. Flying from Oregon to the east coast from November through May would usually have the plane appear to be well _within_ the aurora looking out the airplane windows. They varied in color (magenta, yellow, orange, blue. and red) and extent of the atmosphere and were pretty amazing but it seemed no one else on the flights would pay much attention.
2:50 something I learned recently that kinda blew my mind is that most modern computer storage hardware isn’t designed for data retention in the long run…BUT, aparentky older computers hold up better and data is retained much longer than in newer systems (which periodically schedule to manage and prevent data decay). It almost feels like we found ourselves lucky enough that our oldest stuff held out long enough for us to realize in time that data retention is important and probably the old hardware has allowed for many successful data recoveries that may not be possible with our current hardware at such timescales.
I'm from California, and I do recommend driving Hwy 1 from end to end. Definitely make sure you give yourself plenty of time to do the journey right. Trust me on that. There are so many experiences to be savored along the way, and the driving itself is generally very active and requires a lot of concentration, so you're gonna want to take fairly frequent breaks to just chill and take everything in. I also recommend going from south to north so you conclude your adventure in the super laid-back and stunningly gorgeous North Coast, and you might as well continue on the very special stretch of 101 that runs deep through the sticks of northern CA up to Oregon (and get some of that incredible smoked fish from Paul's in Klamath!).
Check first to see if it's open. Most of the central portion has been closed for most of the past two years due to landslides!
My parents went to Iceland several years ago for their anniversary. They absolutely loved it. They would reccomend it to anyone that can do it.
there's solid state battery pouches in limited testing productions, theres also graphien textiles with single strand to multiple for actual textiles (fabrics, meshes, 3d addetive print in place cables or tiny wireframes in the prints?), metal organic frameworks are being explored further (0 energy filtering process, salts "lithum" being the main one, h2o water filtration, etc etc..), project voxel storage explored data storage in 3 dimenions in a quartz medium, we have also unlocked two bands of prior issue prone "fiber wavelengths" that open the bandwidth sunami flood gates, and we are also exploring the voxel data storage in dvd media style as well 🎉🎉🎉🎉 alooots going on
The problem is that there's already been a large loss of digital information--so many early websites from the 90s and early 2000s and content from web services (AOL, Compuserve) are completely gone. The other issue that archivists are dealing with are how to keep digital formats readable for decades--think of data on a floppy disk and how much effort it would take now to get info off of a floppy disk. Also, file formats change over time and can become unreadable.
As one of those people who spent a LOT of time making sure that Y2K didn't happen (I wrote software that is used by banks, government, healthcare, and a host of other critical industries), THANK YOU for actually acknowledging our efforts to prevent what was a very real problem. I'll grant that the media over-dramatized the situation (by late 1999, we had long since addressed all critical systems and major media knew that), but I still want to punch my screen every time a presenter on here describes Y2K as a hoax.
BitRot-question - Yes, most information is digital now and all kinds of informationstorage has a risk of being destroyed resulting in loss of information. It will not be a sudden thing, but it is a process that is ongoing. Can you open a ZIP-archive on your computer today? Yes. Can you open a RAR-archive? No? It is an older archive type. Can you open a WordPerfect file and read it? It is possible to find only converters for it. What about an older obscure text-editor file that is in a copyrighted format? Probably not. This is how information will be lost. - Like not being able to read a floppydisk 5 1/4" on a modern computer. You can go full archeologist and find solutions, but sooner or later, you will lose information like fading old photos in your photoalbum.
You should definitely go to Iceland! I finally went last summer and it was the trip of a lifetime.
They had a bunch of electrical stuff…Arc Lights, Telegraphs, Telegraph Printers, Electric Semaphore Signals for Trains, Burglar Alarms in big cities…Fire Telegraphs…so the Carrington Event made tons of havoc…
I also watched 3 Body Problem, and that thing with the wires destroying that ship and slicing everyone into bits, while disturbing, was quite cool at the same time.
The best recent scifi show IMO is the animated Scavenger's Reign on HBO. It does amazing world building and the animation is phenomenal.
For All Mankind is incredible. Worth the watch for anyone who hasn’t started it yet.
To Nick the editor, nice work, some great easter eggs and refs in this one, gave me the giggles a few times.
To Joe, Centralia is largely just a handful of roads and a bunch of empty lots with the remains of foundations, it's an eerie and ghostly town type of thing, minus the town part. Neat to see in person I suppose, then again, I used to live up that way and drive through it to get to other towns so many times maybe it just lost its allure for me, idk. Last time I went up that way, there was I think 2 houses left, that was quite a few years back, so I'm not sure even those last holdouts are still there.
Iceland is one of my favorite places on Earth! Only a 5-ish hour flight from New York and gorgeous. I fell in love with winter there 😍😍😍
I didn't play Fallout. My son did, he talked me into watching it. It's actually really good.
I actually watched the 3 Body Problem because you mentioned it in some videos ago, now it becomes one of my favourite sci-fi series!
The blinking stars scene made my jaw dropped, what an incredible mindboggling sight to see
Now I'm planning to read book and watch the Tencent's version of the series 👍🏼
for recommendations, I recommend Undone, a two-season series from Prime, it's a sci-fi fantasy story, I gotta say it's about time travel? but presented in a whole new way, the rotoscoping animation is reallyy cool
and the cast are also amazing, it has Bob Odenkirk and Rosa Salazar as a dad and daughter, what an incredible acting and story, loveee this series so much
@joescott if you're fascinated by Antarctica, I strongly recommend watching Antarctica: A Year On Ice. It's a documentary that covers one year of people's lives there in the main town. It's very interesting but also just beautiful. There's an ethereal, dark beauty about the place, like a part of earth that's still calm and natural. I have watched it already twice and I'm gonna watch it again soon.
*Loved the Salt Water Battery search segment!!!*
That's just what an internet search/ rabbit hole feels like.
When Joe does *humor* he's the best on TH-cam 24:55
17:42 The book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn is SO GOOD!! Its a trilogy actually, "My Ishmael" and "The Story of B".. they're all fantastically good, and yes, the Gorilla is the teacher.
I've been to Centralia! It's wild. It is closed off now but as a kid in Pennsylvania, we would drive through it on our way to Knoebles Grove amusement park.
10/10 recommend that park for anyone who finds themselves in that neck of the woods!!
Hey Joe, (where you going...) two things.
1. Fallout is fantastic. It catches the game very well, if that matters to you.
2. X-Men '97. Seriously. The first several episodes are fine, and reminded me of seeing the cartoon as a teen and enjoying it because I liked the comics and had nothing else going on, on a Saturday morning. But then. Joe. This unassuming cartoon? It KICKS THE DOOR DOWN AND SAYS "ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?!" It's good. They went from a fun cartoon to "hey, we know all those cute little filmmaking tricks you like" and it floors you. Very well done. At least watch it until you know what I'm talking about (and you will know) before you stop.
I've been to Centralia! It's super weird. I would suggest going in winter, seeing melted holes in the snow and then walking up to them to feel the heat coming out was very neat.
There is actually a new Y2K bug-like bug: the Y2038 problem. The way most systems fixed Y2K is to use a signed 32 bit binary integer to capture the seconds since Jan 1st 1970. At 3:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, they'll run out of bits. For the data rot problem you were talking about though, there are some cool advancements in etching data into glass and crystals. It's supposedly immune to data rot, doesn't need to be powered or kept at ideal temps, and doesn't need to be kept spinning like a HDD -- which means it generates less heat, and doesn't need AC like server farms today.
Bit rot will be a problem for more obscure information. Bit rot is easily avoidable for anything people actually pay attention to because making perfect digital copies is as easy as "save picture as."
But the growing popularity of lost media shows that things can easily be forgotten if it's not on anyone's radar.
I LOVED ISHMAEL!!! I wrote that before I heard you say something about Star Trek. I keep seeing this ad that says, “Star Trek tells us that there will be a future.”. I find Star Trek so inspiring and helps calm my mind about the future.
I feel like modern bit rot is not about hard drives failing, it's more about economic effects and company decisions taking them offline on purpose. An easy example is that if you look at any thread on a forum site from the 90s or early 2000s there will be a ton of posts containing broken images, as the site hosting them is now long gone. Likewise with any links to other sites, the page it linked to is probably missing now.
This is how information is lost now, it's explicitly taken offline.
@1:58 Thank you for mentioning that part. I still run into people who think that because nothing happened all the worry was for nothing. Meanwhile I vividly remember several overnights of patching BIOS' and updating pieces of software. Even some of the damn printers had to be patched.
12:36 there's a great picture of the milky way galaxy with a bubble showing how far our oldest transmissions have traveled by now and its absolutely tiny compared to the rest of the galaxy, let alone the universe. Even if there *were* other civilizations out there they wouldnt even be able to see us yet, let alone interact with us. So yea I think time is a major solution for the Fermi Paradox
The black screen for the Mariana Trench was funny af I laughed harder than I should’ve
NICK! Great job editing the salt battery research!
I believe the first question on "bit rot" is not actual data degrading, but becoming unavailable because the service is gone. Any data behind the walled garden could be lost to users if it wasn't captured by the Wayback Machine or hosted elsewhere, but could live on if scanned by some large language model.
My issue with internet bit-rot is individuals and corporations removing the content from where it originally existed. It would of course still exist on archival sites but the ease of access to it goes away. The information remains but our ability to find it is rotting away
That bit with you researching SW batteries was amazingly edited 👌
I heard somewhere that the best explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that EM communications just weakens until it just forms part of the CMB, only after a few tens of light years. So basically, we're all just too far away from each other to be able to hear one another.
I definitely think you should make a video about the game starfield, Bethesda (the company who made fallout and elder scrolls) literally collaborated with NASA and space X for the data on space. It’s one of my favorite games ever made, it’s truly a masterpiece and an incredibly accurate representation on space.
Bit rot and bit flips are mainly a problem for cold storage drives. On active drives, those errors are caught via parity bits and corrected quickly enough to be a nonissue for the most part. Additionally, any competent data management plan accounts for that issue via redundancy.
I was lucky enough to get to see both truly beautiful and amazing events. Both of them were incredible.
Yes, would love an update on salt batteries. I read about them a number of years back (I think it was AquaBattery from the University of Delft?). I haven't heard much since then and would love to hear more about how research into this technology has been going.
Fermi Paradox - totally agreed: I think the issue is time. Basically advanced civilizations, if they're out there, only produce a small bubble of information before they go away. That combined with the inverse square law, means that the window to capture an alien message is real slim. I also think life will be real common, and even what we would consider intelligent life will be relatively common (we have something like 5+ intelligent species on the planet right now - corvids, great apes, orcas, octopus, etc). I think technologically advanced civilizations will be extremely rare.
I love Love LOVE that the Three Seashells not only 1) show up as a reference in this video but also 2) you used a screen grab from Cyberpunk 2077. That little Easter egg had me on the floor laughing the first time I found it in Cyberpunk. In my old condo I put three sea shells on the bathroom sink. It was funny to me. :)
Joe, could you talk about burning plastics vs. pyrolysis of plastics--why the latter is not widely adopted, what calculation goes into it, and how we can get more pyrolysis going if that is a cleaner way of recycling?
I don't know how often you get time to read/listen to books, however, I have a recommendation based on your last lightning round question. The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton is a pretty good series that has the cure for aging as a good thing. Still plenty of drama, but I really like the premise of this series!