web3dom #15 - Forever preserving human history and culture - for how long ever?

Imagine a group of fervent suitors pursuing you. You ask them to express their eternal love. As a result, Alex carves "I love you" on a stone, Bob writes "I love you" on the blockchain, and Carlos says "forever" is just a deceptive trick that is impossible to achieve. Who would you choose?

In 2015, Liu Cixin was honored with the Hugo Award, the highest recognition for science fiction, for the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem". In the third installment of the series (spoiler alert!), as humans face extinction, the federal government establishes the Earth Civilization Museum to preserve human cultural heritage and messages, hoping that civilizations in the universe would know of our existence a billion years later.

Scientists worldwide participated in the research. They found that specially designed photons could preserve messages for 100,000 years, and printed from special paper and ink even better, lasting 200,000 years. However, these were distanced from the research goal. Later, a method to preserve messages for 100 million years was found, one that scientists found almost unspeakable - carving words on stones. The Earth Civilization Museum, engraved with masterpieces like "Starry Night" and "Mona Lisa" and documenting human history, was then established underground on Pluto. In the end, Pluto couldn't withstand an alien attack, and the museum was destroyed. Still, a few humans who fortuitously survived in space used stone inscriptions to convey messages to the protagonist arriving nearly 20 million years later.

Of course, no matter how brilliant "The Three-Body Problem" is, it's fiction, not strict science. Yet I believe that of all storage mediums, stone is the most enduring. In a sense, modern humans have received messages from over a hundred million years ago through similar means: dinosaur fossils. The idea of carving messages into stone for eternal preservation may seem outdated and impractical (unless it's diamond), but it's deeply wise, a "low tech" approach.

Ancient "blockchain node": The Rosetta Stone (Photo courtesy of Hans Hillewaert @ CC BY-SA 4.0).

However, how can we ensure the preservation of stone, so it doesn’t end up lost like the "Heart of the Ocean" from "Titanic"? If backups are made on extra stones, do they still represent the same affection? If someone else brings a similar stone and carves the same words, how can one distinguish between them? Who decides what's genuine? These are precisely the problems blockchain seeks to address.

Funny enough, I've often used the stone analogy to explain blockchain features to non-tech audiences. Imagine primitive tribes with a large stone wall that everyone can see and write on. Once written, it never fades, so anyone can't erase existing records but can only add more. All messages are passed down – this is the "blockchain" of primitive people.

Meant as an analogy, the digital "blockchain" isn’t entirely comparable to physical stone on all levels. Besides “immutability”, “decentralization” is a characteristic unique to blockchain. In fact, the two features are meaningful only when considered together."Mutability" does not mean that the content is locked and cannot be modified; on the contrary, anyone can freely read the data, copy it, and make changes. The issue arises when data is altered privately without consensus from the community, as it no longer matches the data stored by multiple nodes in a decentralized manner, which can then be discovered by the public.

Decentralization and mutability are interdependent. The former brings about the latter, and the latter gives the former consensus and meaning. Any group can be decentralized, but if even consensus is "decentralized," it becomes a scattered and meaningless entity.

Blockchain is fragile; a global power outage would make it unreadable. Engraving on stone might last a hundred million years, but if Earth is destroyed, all would be lost. Even if inscribed on Pluto, it too has its end. Carlos is right.

Cynics are clear that embracing futility places them on invincible ground. Not being defeated doesn’t mean victory or a meaningful life. The claim that something eternal shouldn’t be attempted for its unattainability isn’t just ungentle or unromantic, it overlooks the context of human interaction.

The eternity that couples talk about must be understood, felt, and invested in within the context of a relationship. This is not mathematics; discussing it in terms of absolute measurements all at once only shows the attempt to seem knowledgeable. Such a person, if you ask them about the temperature today, they would say it's over 300 degrees, relative to absolute zero. If you ask them if they've had lunch, they always say they have, relative to their entire life.

Even in mathematics, concepts unattainable in the physical world often prove useful, like the imaginary unit "i", represented as √-1. It doesn't exist in the physical world, yet it's a mathematical concept that aids in solving many challenging problems. Infinity (♾️) and eternity are even more comparable. Let's assume infinity is represented as "x." No matter what number "y" you choose, "x" will always be greater. But here's the conundrum: What if I say "x+1"? Regardless of how large the number you mentioned was, I can always find a larger one. This demonstrates that infinity itself is also non-existent. The same principle applies to eternity. Whether we're discussing a hundred years, ten thousand years, or the approximately 13.8 billion years since the beginning of the universe, you can always find a longer span of time. Therefore, eternity is also non-existent, especially when considered in relation to the small Earth and the minuscule existence of humanity.

Yet, the concept of "forever" indeed exists. It serves as an aspirational goal that expresses the imagined distant future, facilitating communication between people, like the eternal preservation of human art, culture, and history.

Now, let's try to imagine, suppose a journalist took photos of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and wrote a detailed report, and both were digitized and published. How can we ensure that readers in 2089, 2189, or even later generations can access this information?

To allow data to be passed down to future generations, we must face three challenges: loss, tampering, and wear. Loss can further be classified into natural loss and historical cleansing. The former probably wouldn't occur for major international events like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, countless events and pieces of information happen every day. Let's say your small village is destroyed. As cruel as it sounds, even if that meant everything to you, it might not necessarily attract international attention. In an age where attention is extremely scarce, everyone needs to be aware that they must "save their own history."

Although the history of the Berlin Wall seems well-preserved now, no one can predict who will be in power in Germany in another hundred years. If this history embarrasses the ruling power at that time, destroying historical documents and censoring civilian reports is not uncommon, regardless of the form of government.

If you think historical cleansing is the epitome of evil, then you're still naive. Compared to deletion, tampering is even more destructive. When records are deleted, at least you know what you don't know. But when records are tampered with, the audience is misled without even realizing it.

In the past, tampering with history was a "monopoly" of authoritarian regimes. Now, in an era where anyone can be a media entity, spreading false information has become a weapon or even a toy for the masses. As AI becomes more widespread, the barrier to entry is lowering. Generative AI is just beginning, with models like ChatGPT able to generate text, and the images produced by Midjourney can even deceive professionals, winning art awards. The era of "pictures as proof" has gone. By 2089, when future generations read reports of the fall of the Berlin Wall, how can they be sure that the photos were indeed taken in 1989 and weren't fabricated or altered by just 1%?

Compared to loss and tampering, the "wear" of electronic files is often overlooked. The "Internet Archive," which aims for "Universal Access to All Knowledge," founder Brewster Kahle wrote an article titled "Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books" last year. He pointed out an interesting fact: a book from a hundred years ago can still be read today, but an e-book from just ten years ago might already be unreadable.

The potential wear and tear of physical books is self-explanatory. Kahle lists several reasons why e-books can become unreadable, from physical wear and tear of data storage mediums to hardware updates and changing file formats. For example, even if someone left behind a 5-¼ inch floppy disk with intact data, reading it today wouldn't be easy. Not to mention there were 8-inch floppy disks, magnetic tapes, punch cards before that, and later came 3.5-inch floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, MDs, Zip Drives, solid-state drives, SD cards, USB drives, Blu-rays, and so on... In just thirty years, storage media has undergone numerous innovations. Reading files from 1989 in 2089 or 2189 is clearly not a straightforward matter.

Document formats have their complications as well. Kahle only lists some common ones like djvu, daisy, epub1, epub2, epub3, and pdf-a, but doesn't touch upon the variations in audio, image, video, and compressed files over the past decades. Suppose you successfully find a personal computer with a 5-¼-inch floppy disk drive to access the data left by someone in the past. If it contains an arj compressed file, you'll also need to find software to decompress it. The formidable challenges involved in accessing digital data from the past are what Kahle refers to as the "wear out" of electronic books.

Brewster Kahle and the "Internet Archive" servers (Photo by: Rudy Rucker, Source: The Long Now Foundation).

Decentralized publishing was born in this context, trying to address the resistance to preserving human historical culture. 

Instead of searching for a medium that can permanently store data, decentralized publishing assumes that any storage medium or node might be destroyed due to various reasons, whether they be natural disasters, human-made disasters, politics, or economics. Therefore, it doesn't rely on any single centralized organization for storage but allows publications to be distributed and stored by different entities and individuals worldwide.

Decentralized publishing emphasizes not the strength of a single point but the overall resilience, striving for regeneration without a central entity. It also uses mathematics to achieve consensus, ensuring data is complete, consistent, and sustainable. Through decentralized publishing, anyone can publish works that can be read by everyone once released. No one can delete or tamper with them, so data remains preserved in its original form.

Technically, decentralized publishing uses blockchain and distributed storage systems to store metadata and the main content, respectively. The blockchain allows data to be stored permanently across the entire network, albeit at a high cost, making it suitable only for metadata. Content like images requires a separate distributed storage system, the most popular being IPFS (Interplanetary File System), which allows anyone on the network to participate in backups and ensures data integrity and consistency through mathematics.

To bind metadata and the main content, hash value, equivalent to a content fingerprint, is stored in the blockchain as one of the metadata. If the content experiences update or format maintenance, the metadata will also be updated to record the hash value of the new file, marking it as a new version of the original file, achieving traceability.

Returning to the example of the Berlin Wall, traditional publishing relies on centralized institutions for record-keeping. Even if you are willing to cooperate in long-term storage of photos and reports, it's not guaranteed that you can find the source. Even if you find the source and preserve it well, those in need of the data may not know where to find the data you've stored. Finally, even if they are fortunate enough to find you, it's difficult to prove that the report is the authentic "original." This series of collaborative challenges is precisely the core concern of decentralized publishing.

However, decentralized publishing is still in its infancy, and there are many flaws in its implementation. The most criticized aspect is its difficulty of use, but with ongoing research and design, the user interface is gradually being improved. Next, although IPFS provides a foundation for collaborative storage, if no one in the world stores a particular file, it will still be lost. It meets the necessary conditions for collective memory, allowing memories to fight against oblivion, but if the entire society doesn't care, things will eventually be forgotten.

The most challenging issue to address is the user's habits. The blockchain and IPFS technologies used in decentralized publishing are like an international "Museum of Human Civilization". Even if the technology truly prevents human cultural history from being deleted or tampered with, just as people don't visit museums every day, the average person primarily receives information through the most convenient means like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Even if these platforms aren't led by institutional entities, they still have to adhere to institutional constraints and scrutiny. If the German regime in 2089 doesn't want its citizens to read about the Berlin Wall in 1989, it can easily remove the related information from mainstream platforms; even worse, it can fabricate narratives favorable to the regime and spread them widely through algorithms that emphasize propagation.

The goal of decentralized publishing is to permanently preserve human historical culture. However, no matter how advanced the technology becomes, it's only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. To battle oblivion, we also rely on the public's technological knowledge, media literacy, and civic awareness.

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