What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age' - eviltoast

Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.

    • reflex@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      How would we piece our history back together?

      Maybe some kind of foundation to stem the period of bahbawism?

    • gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      “The aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.”

      Lol, this must’ve been hella confusing.

    • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<

      • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Bro Texas won’t even pay to weatherize their power grid and they know cold weather happens every winter.

          • Unaware7013@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            No that was the bullshit ercot put out to cover for the fact that fossil fuel production dropped by half or more. Source:

            But the majority of the power losses were from gas plants, including 25 gigawatts of capacity that went offline. Coal and nuclear outages cut another 4.5 gigawatts and 1.3 gigawatts respectively, according to the University of Texas at Austin report. Considering that peak demand was about 70 gigawatts, losing about 30 gigawatts from gas, coal and nuclear was a disaster.

            Wind energy also performed poorly, starting with ice accumulation that led to some wind farms needing to shut down early in the crisis. Wind power outages peaked at about 9 gigawatts, a number that takes into account wind levels on those days, according to the UT Austin repor

            It’s not like wind is blameless, but (the power crisis) wasn’t caused by wind failure,” said Webber. To say otherwise is “at best misleading, at worst an outright lie.”

            Natural gas and coal totals 70% of their total generation, and wind was 20%, so losing half of both means fossil fuels was much more impactful.

      • Balder@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be honest this doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I’m sure there are countries that might spend resources on this, but mine 100% won’t. And if the majority of the world is screwed, I guess we can all agree there won’t be any stable place.

        This episode of Why Files was really worrying.

    • squib@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Pretty obvious. We build a time machine to go back to 1776. Then, when it malfunctions and sends to 1976 instead we learn the art of The Hustle.

    • Jaded@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      We would definitely lose some data but I’m guessing there’s a few hundred backups of Wikipedia and the important stuff floating around.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        A huge solar storm could wipe out the backups too unless they’re stored in a deep vault or something.

        • Jaded@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Solar storms arent really a risk for small electronics, more so if they aren’t connected to the grid. You wouldn’t need a deep vault, more like a cupboard.

          There is a risk the hard drives wear out before society gets the grid back online and restarts producing hard drives though. We already don’t have that many facilities and they would certainly be taken offline, and the knowledge to build those facilities, that might get lost properly when the storm would hit.

    • Bobert@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      “All things are made of atoms; little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”