4 Years of Service
It took us almost two thousand years to re-discover how to make roman concrete, so who knows what knowledge has been lost over the years. Not just from the big events but also the trades that have died out from modernization but could have had wider applications.Yes but look at whats happened just with games over the years. There are games that were made that have just disappeared due to changing tech standards and the lack of backwards compatibility. Just because something is readable and usable now doesn't mean it always will be, which is what I'm getting at. Yes the internet is great for distributing to multiple places but all those places rely on electricity. Imagine if you will a scenario where some of those servers lose power or are destroyed. What's there is gone forever. We know that HDD's and SSD's can degrade and lose effectiveness over time or through use and then what is on them could be lost, same as the talk here about CD's, DVD's, VHS and cellulose film degrading over time. Just because things could be stored in multiple redundant locations doesn't necessarily mean they will be. It would be extremely expensive to have all that duplication when you could use the space more efficiently by storing only one copy in one place. That's how these companies think. Not about preservation but about the bottom line.
And yes there is more information available now from a few hundred years ago because of the printing press but can you tell me what has not survived. What was destroyed during the colonial expansions from Europe inn the 15th to 18th centuries. What got lost during the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. What got burnt during the rise of facism in Europe in the 20th Century.
The point I'm making is that all we know is what survived. We'll never know what we've lost, and that will remain true as we go into the future. It's already happening.