Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. I am Rock and today I will explain to you how the GitHub platform intends to bequeath the sum of all our current knowledge to our distant descendants.
For GitHub management, there is an urgent need to review our data archiving model. “A disturbing amount of global knowledge is currently stored on ephemeral media,” recently lamented Jon Evans, founding director of GitHub’s archive program at the conclusion of a project that is atypical to say the least and yet essential for the safeguarding of the human genius.
Dubbed the “Arctic Code Vault,” this project basically takes the form of a steel box weighing nearly 1.5 tons covered with engravings generated by artificial intelligence. Come on, come on, don’t go too fast! Because what really matters is what this box contains, namely 21 terabytes of public data written in QR code with the stated intention of engraving in stone the sum of all our current knowledge for future generations.
A considerable legacy
For GitHub, this huge database is no more, no less than the legacy that we will bequeath to our distant descendants, or more precisely to the forms of life that will populate our planet in a millennium. Yes, you heard right, a millennium, a period you imagine difficult to conceive for the mortals that we are.
All of this data has been buried since last July at a depth of 250 meters in an old coal mine located in a mountain in Svalbard, Norway. A place with a freezing climate, due to its proximity to the North Pole, which has for the record the considerable advantage of being located near the world seed reserve, also buried in Svalbard.
“Our hope is that by storing and indexing millions of repositories, we will have captured a valuable sample of the modern software world,” says GitHub. It remains to be seen whether one of today’s digital giants will still exist in 1,000 years, when this data critical to the survival of today’s human genius will see the light of day again.