[ExI] mayan forecast

[The Avantguardian]

________________________________
From: Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org 
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 11:34 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] mayan forecast

Anders wrote:

>[ If the probability that something survives is p, and there are N uncorrelated copies of it, the probability of at least one copy surviving is 1-(1-p)^N. As N increases this becomes a step-function shifting for near zero survival if p < 1/N to near certain for p > 1/N. So if you want to save a one-in-a-million survival object make sure to make two million copies and spread them around. Spam will outlast everything. ]

Great. Future archealogists will write about this historical era as the "Age of Penis Enlargement". That is kind of sad really.
 
 
>[[ The real problem is single mode failures, like all electronic media failing at the same time. So the real threat is not that CD-ROMs decay or computers are volatile, but that we store all our information in too similar modes. ]]

Not to mention constant evolution of the storage media and encoding standards. Like a fortran file on 8 1/2 inch floppy that contains the secrets of the universe. Good luck getting at that info in a hundred years.
 
 
Stuart LaForge

“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”- Karol Józef Wojtyla