Can we preserve knowledge … forever?
Episode
49 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Fundraising & VC, Software Development
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Web Archiving Participation: The Internet Archive's "Save Page Now" feature at archive.org allows anyone to permanently archive any URL and is used approximately 80 times per second. Individual users can directly contribute to preserving the web by submitting links — obituaries, news articles, or any page at risk of deletion — before content disappears within its average 100-day lifespan.
- ✓DNA Data Encoding: Digital data converts to DNA using a two-bit-per-letter encoding scheme: 00=A, 01=C, 10=G, 11=T. The resulting text file is sent to a synthesis company, which returns a dried powder within days. Stored frozen in silica glass beads, DNA remains stable for thousands of years, as demonstrated by ETH Zurich researchers who successfully recovered data after simulated millennium-scale storage conditions.
- ✓Digital Ownership Risk: Publishers license rather than sell ebooks, meaning files on Kindle or similar devices can be altered or deleted without user consent at any time. The Internet Archive's legal battle with four major publishers — over its practice of buying physical books, scanning them, and lending digital copies — has already resulted in restricted access to 500,000 titles, signaling a structural threat to digital preservation efforts.
- ✓Lidar Scanning Efficiency: Airborne lidar technology, which fires hundreds of thousands of infrared pulses per second to generate full 3D terrain maps, compressed 20 years of conventional archaeological fieldwork at Mexico's Angamuco site into 45 minutes of flight time. The Earth Archive project uses this method to prioritize scanning regions most threatened by climate change, deforestation, and rising sea levels before those landscapes are permanently altered.
- ✓Baseline Data Strategy: Effective climate change mitigation requires a high-resolution "before" dataset of Earth's surface, which currently does not exist for most of the planet. The Earth Archive addresses this by scanning vegetation, topography, hydrology, and archaeological features simultaneously in a single lidar pass, creating layered records that future scientists can analyze using techniques not yet invented, including for questions not yet conceived.
What It Covers
TED Radio Hour explores three approaches to preserving human knowledge permanently: Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has saved over 866 billion web pages since 1996; molecular biologist Dina Zelensky demonstrates DNA as a data storage medium; and archaeologist Chris Fisher uses lidar scanning to create a digital record of a rapidly changing Earth.
Key Questions Answered
- •Web Archiving Participation: The Internet Archive's "Save Page Now" feature at archive.org allows anyone to permanently archive any URL and is used approximately 80 times per second. Individual users can directly contribute to preserving the web by submitting links — obituaries, news articles, or any page at risk of deletion — before content disappears within its average 100-day lifespan.
- •DNA Data Encoding: Digital data converts to DNA using a two-bit-per-letter encoding scheme: 00=A, 01=C, 10=G, 11=T. The resulting text file is sent to a synthesis company, which returns a dried powder within days. Stored frozen in silica glass beads, DNA remains stable for thousands of years, as demonstrated by ETH Zurich researchers who successfully recovered data after simulated millennium-scale storage conditions.
- •Digital Ownership Risk: Publishers license rather than sell ebooks, meaning files on Kindle or similar devices can be altered or deleted without user consent at any time. The Internet Archive's legal battle with four major publishers — over its practice of buying physical books, scanning them, and lending digital copies — has already resulted in restricted access to 500,000 titles, signaling a structural threat to digital preservation efforts.
- •Lidar Scanning Efficiency: Airborne lidar technology, which fires hundreds of thousands of infrared pulses per second to generate full 3D terrain maps, compressed 20 years of conventional archaeological fieldwork at Mexico's Angamuco site into 45 minutes of flight time. The Earth Archive project uses this method to prioritize scanning regions most threatened by climate change, deforestation, and rising sea levels before those landscapes are permanently altered.
- •Baseline Data Strategy: Effective climate change mitigation requires a high-resolution "before" dataset of Earth's surface, which currently does not exist for most of the planet. The Earth Archive addresses this by scanning vegetation, topography, hydrology, and archaeological features simultaneously in a single lidar pass, creating layered records that future scientists can analyze using techniques not yet invented, including for questions not yet conceived.
Notable Moment
When archaeologist Chris Fisher returned to the newly discovered City of the Jaguar in Honduras just eleven months after its initial documentation, the site had been dramatically altered by the very government soldiers stationed to protect it — making his original lidar scan the sole record of the location as it once existed.
Episode Transcript
This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and we are going to take you back to 1989 and to the first gay video game ever. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a big deal. The sounds had to be kept very small. Hey. Hey. Everything had to fit on that 800 megabyte diskette. It was very limited. Let's see. Let's see. Come. Come to all. The basic premise of the game is that you assume the role of a lesbian detective named Tracker McDyke, And you are you are searching for your friend who is a drag queen, and her name is Tessie Lafemme. This is Cianne Ralph, the creator of Caper in the Castro. She's got some inside information about something that's going on in this little neighborhood of the game, which is the metaphor for Castro Street in, San Francisco. But before she can get the information to you, the phone suddenly hangs up. And this is where you're left. You're left, oh my god. Where's my friend? In the late eighties, Centimeters was working in Silicon Valley by day and at night making Caper and the Castro on their Mac plus. Tessie, thankfully, if you finish the game, you free her. She's trapped down in a cellar with all these, bio contaminants that the secret plot is they're gonna release this into the air or water or something. A lot of it's not clear to me still, but that's the threat, the annihilation basically of LGBTQ community. And I think that directly reflects how it felt back then. During that time, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and I had seen so many of my gay male friends just disappear. It felt at times like we were under annihilation and nobody cared. No one was helping us. We had to help each other. So when Caper and the Castro was complete, Centimeters shared it with friends. Someone posted it on an online LGBTQ bulletin board, and the game took off. Yeah. You know, it just kind of spread. So at its high point, about how many copies do you think were downloaded? The estimate I had been given and this was after it had been out for about five years, somebody had estimated it was about 250,000 copies. Wow. Yeah. But we have no way of knowing. So did you make any other games, or was that it? This was really the …
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“Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has saved over 866 billion web pages since 1996”
- Save Page NowRecommended
by Internet Archive
“The Internet Archive's 'Save Page Now' feature at archive.org allows anyone to permanently archive any URL and is used approximately 80 times per second.”
“The Earth Archive project uses this method to prioritize scanning regions most threatened by climate change, deforestation, and rising sea levels before those landscapes are permanently altered.”
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