[ExI] physics question

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 7:46 AM Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 5:32 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> No computer expert here, but I have been told that my Windows software
>> corrupts itself over a period of time, and so would up and downloads.
>> "Yeah, but we'll solve those problems....blah blah"
>>
>
> No, software doesn't corrupt itself.
>
>
But there is the notion of "bit rot", due to limits of hardware, every
physical device or component has a "MTTF" (Mean Time to Failure). This
applies to devices that store data.

There are technologies that use multiple components in parallel and
self-heal and recover data when one of those components fails (RAID,
Replication, Erasure Codes, etc.) (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4702 )

This does not eliminate the MTTF of the system, but can serve to make it
arbitrarily large, and using erasure codes this can be done with minimal
overhead.  The consequence of this, for transhumanists, or any entity for
that matter, is that life expectancy will be given by the MTTDL (mean time
to data loss) of the underlying storage mechanism responsible for storing
the bits that make up the mind.

Jason
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