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Digital Doomsday: Risks Of Reliance On Digital Data

I had two retired XP computers, so I used the older one. Still had my W98 CD. I had to do some workarounds for things like the processor being a bit too fast, things like that. Information about that stuff was easy to find on the web. Finally, 98 worked normally. After Dark loaded and worked, for the most part. You could run Mowin' Man, Boris, Pipes or whatever, but Lunatic Fringe would either not work at all or not work anywhere near normally. Bummer. After poking around in 98 for a while, I realized I didn't miss it at all. Went ahead and recycled the machine.

I'm okay with not ever getting to play the game again; it just seems silly that it's so hard to get a tiny little program to run on machines made after 98 was obsolete.
 
The previous postings on this thread have addressed the doomsday scenario involving the loss of critical digital data.

There's also a potential problem involving the reverse - i.e., the burdens of maintaining all the digital data we've created and which we continue to generate at an increasing rate.
Digital content to total half Earth's mass by 2245

Every day, Earth's natural resources are converted into digital information.

As more and more raw materials and fossil fuels are used to power the computer systems and servers that support the digital economy, the Earth gets a little smaller and the world's digital footprint grows a little bigger. ...

According to new research, that's a problem.

Currently, one sextillion new digital bits of information are created each year. But each year that number goes up, and according to a new study, the growth of the digital economy will eventually become unsustainable. ...

"Assuming a 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that after [approximately] 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth," Melvin Vopson, physicist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain, wrote in a new paper published Tuesday in the journal AIP Advances.

If that growth rate increases to 50 percent, digital information will exceed half the Earth's mass by 2245.

"The growth of digital information seems truly unstoppable," Vopson said in a news release. "According to IBM and other big data research sources, 90 percent of the world's data today has been created in the last 10 years alone." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/20...total-half-Earths-mass-by-2245/6541597161350/
 
Just waiting for a big coronal mass ejection from the sun to reset all electronics and stored data and take us back to the stone age. It will be the big reset. Of course we got enough information "stored" in books to come back to the electronic age within a few decades.
 
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Just waiting for a big coronal mass ejection from the sun to reset all electronics and stored data and take us back to the stone age. It will be the big reset. Of course we got enough information "stored" in books to come back to the electronic age within a few decades.
This is the BIG reason why we shouldn't ever abandon cash.
 
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