Will we be able to read today’s e-books 20 or more years from now? I’ll show you why it’s absurd to hope so.
This is a picture of the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas printed in 1663, 347 years ago. The book is easily readable, the typeset is a little archaic but not dramatically different from the font you are now reading. I have several other books in my home which are over 300 years old. I estimate these books will be readable for 300-400 more years before they are too fragile to be read.
Summa Theologica printed in 1663
Completed in 1274 this edition of the Summa was printed in 1663 and is readable 736 years after the book was written. Will that be true for most or even some e-books which never see paper? I would not take that bet.
Also shown is a 5.25″ floppy disk which contains an electronic copy of my PhD thesis written 22 years ago on an MS-DOS machine in Word 2.0 (or something like that). This disk is not readable for several reasons: 1) I cannot find the hardware to read the disk, 2) Microsoft has intentionally obsoleted this old .doc format, and 3) the magnetic bits have begun to degrade. This disk was essentially unreadable 10 years after it was written. Typical computer storage media have a lifetime of about a decade. The primary driver of this limitation is the economic pressure to stop making outdated equipment. The plastic CD/DVD may survive 20 years, but soon most people will buy pads and phones instead of computers, and few people will live in a home which has the hardware to spin and read a plastic disk.
Many bloggers are joyfully touting the end of bookstores, libraries, and paper books. I believe this will be a disaster for our society because the durability of e-books is measured in years. How many times have you accidentally discarded a book? Now how many times have you accidentally deleted a file, in the past month? Files are lost every day in countless mishaps. Can you imagine a world where the only copies of The Lord of the Rings are electronic and could be permanently lost by a simple keystroke? Or how about a world where we have lost the encryption keys so the only way to read “A Tale of Two Cities” is by an illegal brute force decryption? I don’t want to live in that world.
I predict that within 10 years we will be not be able to buy an e-book reader which can read some files purchased for today’s Kindle or Nook. This may sound absurd but note that I’m not necessarily talking about a technical limitation. If Barnes and Noble cannot find a buyer it may disappear. If Amazon is purchased by Microsoft the obsolescence of the e-book format could become embedded into the product cycle. If the EFF and Cory Doctorow succeed in eliminating the DMCA then the current encryption standards could be judged illegal and a producing a reader which decrypts such materials could also become illegal.
The Long Now foundation Rosetta Project is working on a “book” which will be readable in 10,000 years. That book will be printed using atoms because no 21st century electronic file will be readable in 10k years. Anybody who wants to be able to read books 20 years after purchase had better not buy bits, you should buy atoms. And if books printed with atoms disappear from our lives then God help our society because we are doomed.
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The Stainless Steel Rat Returns.
After 10 year: the return of Slippery Jim DiGriz. Thanks very much to Harry Harrison.
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Well it’s not scifi but it’s still great. As we predicted in 1985,
buckyballs have been found in outer space.
It’s not a big surprise, but it’s a great 25th anniversary present. Here are the data:
In 1986 Rick Smalley asked me if I thought that c60 could be the primordial nucleation site for planetary coalescence. He theorized that c60 could survive the extreme UV of the interstellar environment. No other molecule could survive to become a nucleation site.
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You meant a lot to me. Inherit the Stars was one of the first serious scifi books I read as a teenager. The discovery of a 50,000 year old dead astronaut on the moon was a powerful idea. I also very much liked your book about prejudice in the scientific community: Kicking the Sacred Cow.
I hope you get a flyby of Ganymede. You deserve it.
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Interesting ideas on creativity from Creatologue.
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One of the reasons life survives on Earth is that we have a big brother protecting us from sterilizing events (asteroid bombardment). Jupiter has been a powerful sink for asteroids that would have killed us all. To find alien life in another system we should focus on those systems which have a large planet well outside the habitable zone as seen here.
Exoplanets.org has a list of known exoplanets, and it is sortable by the semi-major axis. Click on that column to sort the exoplanets by their distance from the primary.
Jupiter is about 5 astronomical units (AU) from our G-type star. Here are the first 4 likely candidates.
590 light years away near Pavo is HD 190984 , an F8 star with a big planet at 6 AU.
40 ly away is 55 Cancer, a G8 star with a big one at 5.9 AU.
At 85 ly in Libra, HD 134987 is a G8 star with a planet 0.8 Jupiter masses at 5.8 AU.
49ly away mu-Ara is a G3 star with a planet twice the mass of Jupiter at 5.3 AU.
Statistically speaking these are outstanding targets for hosting alien life. A more detailed analysis may preclude one or more of these due to orbital eccentricity, other planets, or binary star systems. But if spontaneous generation of life is common then at least one of these systems hosts alien life.
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Speculation about life on Titan or other cold worlds is misguided because the chemical reaction rates are simply too slow.
All chemical reactions have a rate. That rate has an exponential dependence on temperature as described by the Arrhenius equation.
rate = A exp (-Ea/kT)
Ea is the activation energy, k is Boltzmann’s constant, T is the temperature, A is the pre-exponential factor
Chemical activation energies are best measured in electron-volts or eV. Typical values are between 1 and 3 eV, usually closer to 2.0. The ground temperature on Titan is around 94 oK or -179 oC.
Thus a chemical reaction on Titan would be roughly 73 orders of magnitude slower than the same reaction on Earth (298 oK). So a reaction which takes a microsecond on Earth would require 10^60 years on Titan. (That’s 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years).
Pre-exponential factors for chemical reactions have a certain value which represents steric effects. They cannot be 60 orders of magnitude larger because molecular geometry is not that pliable.
Traditional chemical reaction based life is impossible on Titan or any other location where the temperature is so far below 298 oK.
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The SETI Institute will host Celebrating Science 2010 Family Science Faire Saturday May 22, 2010.
From their announcement: At our Celebrating Science 2010 Family Science Faire, you will have the opportunity to meet SETI Institute scientists and discover what the future holds for SETI and astrobiology. Learn about the SETI Institute’s pioneering exploration of life, our solar system, and beyond, including the search for signals from other civilizations.
Your opportunity for hands-on science! We will have fun, interactive activities for youth aged 8-15. They will be able to sign up on a first-come, first-serve basis for educational science-based activities. We will also have fun and creative activities for our younger up-and-coming scientists.
Meet the father of SETI and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake. Visit the gift shop for a Drake Equation t-shirt and ask Dr. Drake himself to sign it!
Hear Seth Shostak speak at 2:45 on “Why Your Grandkids Will Live in Space.” Dr. Shostak will be available to autograph his latest book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.
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Interesting article in Science News about SETI: Can you Hear me Now?
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Chuck Lasker is writing the “Time Travel Survival Guide” and soliciting contributions.
I’ve decided to deposit a penny in a bank account in the year 1789 and then transfer the gains to his name in 2188. I’ll get started on that in 2019.
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