Melankholia wrote:

Transhumanity after the Fall has been robbed of a significant amount of human knowledge (history, literature, art, etc.) as well as a variety of more "advanced" technologies that were corrupted, destroyed, or otherwise left behind. I was curious as to how large these gaps of "collected human knowledge" may be, however. I've been dwelling on this for some time as it has a lot to do with the way I am focusing on the Fall, and the Solarchives thread started firing inspiration.

Consider a disaster that wipes out a certain percentage of all copies of something. How much would remain? We can calculate the chance of something that starts with N copies surviving in at least one copy if the deletion probability is p as 1-p^N. [code] Copies 90% deletion 99% deletion 1 copy 10% 1% 10 copies 65% 9.5% 100 copies 99.99% 63% 1000 copies ~100% 99.99% [/code] Now imagine this happening today. Will Plato survive? Most likely, since there are tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of his works in libraries, as ebooks and in people's digital bookshelves. What about science? Again, no problems with Newton's books (although the originals might be lost) or anything in textbooks, widely published history books etc. But I am worried about scientific papers. There are paper copies of Nature and Science in all university libraries. But what about less popular journals, like Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling? There are likely hundreds of paper copies, but increasingly everything primarily gets published online. That means that all the papers are stored at servers run by Springer, Elsevier and the others. If Elseviers server goes, more than 10 million papers and 11,000 books disappear. This is a single point of failure. Sure, they have backups, but in disasters people often discover that their backup solutions were simultaneously vulnerable. A lot of these papers have further copies on the researchers own websites or copied into the virtual clip-books by other academics: interesting papers can likely be restored by diligent search of surviving personal files. But there are two problems: first, the tables of contents will likely have been lost, making it hard to figure out what should have been in an issue. This makes the second problem worse: most papers are never cited, not very well-known and likely not widely copied. So I would imagine in this situation that we would loose at least half of all papers ever written. It is even worse for databases. How many copies are there of genome sequences, Medline or the FBI CODIS DNA fingerprint database? I suspect that this kind of disaster has a good chance of wiping out many important databases we rely on. The problem is worse for big databases like genomics and some astronomy, since few people have a reason to make copies of them. Backups exist, but again they are often more vulnerable than expected and often very hard to move for *big* databases. Note that it is not just the data itself that can be deleted or corrupted, but the encryption keys needed to access it. If the DRM infrastructure needed to unlock an ebook disappears, the book is unreadable (sans a quantum computer cracking it). And it is not too hard to create massive amounts of disinformation with a bit of AI help. If somebody wanted to hide things during the chaos it would be fairly easy to do. So my answer would be that the Fall destroyed many of the top databases (they were valuable targets too) and at least 50% of all scientific papers. Most important knowledge remained, since it was widely copied and can be inferred from the numerous references in other works, but a lot of specific things disappeared. The moon landing can be viewed, but not the news from the night before. And the worst is that we do not know what we have lost: who remembers what was in Issue 4, Volume 23 of Acta Astronautica Siniensis? Or was there ever such a journal? Lots of work for data archaeologists, whether of the desk detective kind or the whip-wielding action kind. "That torrent index belongs in a museum!"

The fall and the massive loss in data is a real shame. As for data that would have survived, its likely that the data or information relating to the survival of humanity would have survived. That information would have likely been stored on every station or space ship transhumanity had. For instance, the data needed to repair or build a life support system. That stuff has practical uses, either on daily basis or once in blue moon when you *really* need it. The next items on the list would be academics. Considering our society's focus on science, anything that might be considered related to education would be the next important things to be backed up. So ya, physics, chemistry, engineering, psychology, medicine, etc. Philosophy might not be considered as important, but many scholars would make the effort to back those up too. Unfortunately, not all philosophy material has survived the ages. If I recall correctly, only about a 3rd of everything Aristotle wrote survived to this age. History would be considered important too. Anything worth putting in a text book should remain. Everything else would be free game though. Everything on youtube, facebook, RPG websites like this one, webcomics, endless lists of personal websites, etc. would be at serious risk of being lost. Considering that the lore suggests that the prometheans helped transhumanity survive, its likely they would have filled in any gaps they felt were important. So the damage caused by the fall might have been far more severe than what tranhumanity realizes.

I think something important hasn't been mentioned that may help determine the fate of all that data: the motivations of the TITANs. Reading over what was written in the core book, it seems the TITANs were acting more in a defensive role in the beginning, then deciding mankind was too much of a risk to leave alone. I don't think any of their tactics appeared to care about humanity's history. They may not have even cared about our data at all. They were beyond it, there was no threat there. Data is certainly important to them, probably worth keeping, and a total waste to go unused or unsaved. The removal of brains and uploading of minds may also have been an attempt to steal data or take it for analysis. I think the many social network things that might have been around were merely their tools to proliferate the viruses. All that fluffy data could be still sitting around on Earth somewhere, but it just may be a ticking time bomb waiting, as I think was mentioned. As maybe lemurs and spider monkeys may be related to us, we may be related to the TITANs. We're just anthropology subjects to them. Protozoa in petrie dishes. Whatever. They left. Who knows why? Bring intelligence back to their "boss?" I think if they really were intent on wiping us out entirely, they could have. (Anyone read about Omnius in the Dune prequels?) The data may or may not be lost, but I think it's more as "collateral damage" than any other motivation specifically targeting that data. It might be all but worthless to them.

Geonis wrote:

The question is, what would the Hypercorps not take off earth for reference in deep space habitats, or what data didn't the Argonauts already begin amassing, and lastly, what pre-fall space colonist not carry with them. I do not feel data would have been heavily lost in such a situation. General knowledge would largely be stored prior to the fall for reference by space-farers, or to keep up with Earth while out on the Kuiper belt. Hypercorps would have reasonable 'backed-up' onto off Earth sites. The largest loss I would see would be anything no digitized data or Secret projects that were not stored in space. I see this are a rather small number of things.

Hmm, this leads to another aspect which may be tangential, but relevant. Any proprietary data of the hypercorps would certainly never go advertised as recovered or not. Even further, that "secret" data may go on the record as lost to just about every external inquiry, yet remain under tight lock-and-key somewhere. Maybe other parties have acquired this data and use it as a means to blackmail or extort a hypercorp. The blackmarket most certainly runs rampant with choice historic data artifacts, which greedy hyperelite may want to get their digital hands on. So, long story longer, add falsified or absent (either deliberate or incidental) reports of data recovery and it begins to get even murkier as to the extent of data and its contents that managed to survive. This conjecture enters the realm of "whatever the GM wants to do in his campaign" pretty much. I'm sorry if I'm not being helpful. :( The problem is that there isn't enough cooperation, I think. Likely vast amounts of data survived, but many may be keeping their hands on it and not sharing, willfully or even innocently without realizing they hold such prize data. I wonder if there is any initiative to collect all this data into a complete whole. Historical preservationists or something.

Corporate off-site off-planet backups were likely common... but also carefully encrypted - after all, you don't want all your secrets to fall into the hands of competitors. There is also the problem of moving data. At present storage grows much faster than bandwidth, and this is extra true over interplanetary distances. Google, Amazon, Facebook or Walmart cannot easily make a backup of everything in their data centres since there is no practical way of transporting petabytes except in the form of a truck filled with hard drives. It is possible to make local backups within the system, and it is possible to make backups of specially important data. But they are not going to be able to put their bulk into orbit or on Mars.