Are we destroying our own present and past with cloud storages?

Documents written on traditional media such as paper or engraved on stones have proven to withstand the test of time, allowing knowledge to be preserved for thousands of years. These physical artifacts have served as essential sources of information about the past, ensuring the transfer of knowledge to future generations.

However, with the advent of technology, the concept of a "paperless" archive has gained prominence. Cloud storage has emerged as a stable and reliable method of storing various types of records, ranging from temporary to permanent or archival, in professional, industrial, business, and personal applications. The digitization of academia has been underway for over a decade, resulting in a swift decline in printed papers. Many archival journals and proceedings are now exclusively published and maintained on cloud servers. One thing for sure is that these cloud storages consume a huge amount of energy and will expand at an exponential rate!

My question is whether these cloud storages will endure for a thousand years. We may foresee that all digital archives would theoretically vanish in a scenario where power is depleted. However, even in a future where energy becomes scarce, human civilization may continue in ways that are beyond our imagination. But then, people have no clue as to what their ancestors had done! In such a future, the existence of archived media that does not rely on mandatory energy supply would prove invaluable and perhaps would be the only source that remains accessible to future generations. 

Let's think about it! With cloud storage replacing printed media, we are destroying our only tangible links to the distant future though it may sound too remote for people to be worried about at the present time! Two thousand years later, whether we will have enough power to maintain such an enormous amount of information is questionable, or are we destroying our own present and past?

June 3, 2024