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What if, faced with threats not so distant such as a great war or an unprecedented environmental disaster, we had to find a way to save the memory of humanity and somehow preserve the record of who we are today as a species? If digital storage were unfeasible due to its volume, energy requirements and environmental costs, then where and how would that file be stored? These questions are far from hypothetical, far from improbable. In fact, governments like Mexico, India, and Norway have been doing this for years and taking action in this regard.
In the Arctic Ocean, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, in the Svalbard archipelago, there is a mountain that 300 meters from its surface houses an old mine where the air is cold, dry and where lightning does not penetrate. of light. There, in the center of the permafrost, in what many recognize as the safest place on the planet, the original model of the Mexican flag has been stored since 2017. Also the Act of Independence and all the constitutions that this country has had between 1814 and 1917. There are also a series of codices created during the Spanish conquest and 492 historical files from 200 years of memory of the Mexican judiciary. All of them in digital format.
“This is not the first time that the national archive has been kept in an underground cave,” explains Gustavo Villanueva Bazán, Mexican historian and expert in archives management at the University of Andalusia. “It is well known that, during the French intervention, Benito Juárez traveled around the country, bringing with him the national archive. Finally, from September 1864 to May 1867 he hid, with guards who gave their lives to take care of him, in a cave called Del Tabaco, in the municipality of Matamoros de La Laguna, Coahuila. Once the Republic was reestablished, the documents were recovered.”
However, the file that the Mexican Government has deposited in 2017 and June 2023 in the Arctic World Archive, as this storage mine is known in one of the northernmost areas of the planet, demilitarized and almost inaccessible, is due to reasons other than those recalled by historian Villanueva Bazán or, at least, to other threats. It is no longer the imminent pressure of another state that encourages preserving the Mexican legacy, but the search for the archives to remain valid for thousands of years, so that they cannot be violated or hacked as they are digital and do not represent an unspeakable carbon footprint.
“At the time of the reestablishment of the Republic or in the current era, the preservation of archives has been a fundamental issue, because the documents allow us not to repeat the mistakes that were made and are fundamental for social and national identity. Because what are we? We are who we have been as a collective, what we have been told, we are the product of what many have thought and done. The documents that were recently kept in this archive are, for example, the reflection of what is done daily in a society, that constant administration, legislation, movement, relationships,” explains the archival expert.
Brazilian works of art and a Colombian podcast
Next to the Mexican archive, there is also the famous painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, preserved by the National Museum of Norway, works by Rembrandt, manuscripts from the Vatican Library, and a very high-resolution 3D scanner built with millions of image fragments of the Taj Mahal. From Latin America, there are also works by Brazilian artists André Terayama, Almicar de Castro, Antonio Bandeira, Orlando Teruz, Laura Lima Nômades, Heitor dos Prazeres, safeguarded by the National Museum of Brazil, and an audio format of more than 20 episodes of the Mizter Rad Show podcast, a radio program led by the Colombian Mizter Rad where interviews are compiled with great global personalities who are defining the future of humanity.
“I heard Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, talk about the Arctic World Archive, a bunker in northern Norway where humanity’s most precious digital archives are kept. I started researching and contacted the founders, Katrine Loen and Rune Bjerkestrand,” explains content creator Mizter Rad. “After interviewing them, I understood that it is an archive that is not only for large national institutions, but is open to anyone who meets certain legal requirements. It is not cheap, of course, nor is it easy to access, but it is the possibility that anyone can be part of the history that will be preserved for the next 2,000 years. “It is the possibility that the story is also told by people like me,” he concludes. podcast who managed to deposit his audio files in the very heart of the permafrost. The Colombian paid 150 euros (just over $160) for each gigabyte of the file he deposited plus the costs of the trip to Norway and the delivery ceremony.
In one of the digitized episodes of his podcast, it is precisely revealed how this global archive works. The founders, who came from the film industry, realized that 35 millimeter films had been very effective ways to keep a record for hundreds of years of what life was really like, for example, in the times of the brothers Lumiere. “We saw that these photosensitive films were a fantastic transmitter of information. So we thought that if they could upload images, maybe they could also upload data. So what we did was turn the film technology into a digital information transporter, where the data is put in bits and bytes and in the form of a QR. code super high resolution,” Rune Bjerkestrand, founder of the project, is heard explaining.
All the files, from the Mexican flag to the façade of the Taj Mahal, are stored in digital format, in such a way that, according to Bjerkestrand, very simple technology is required to be decoded, assuming, for example, that in 2000 years, no one remembers that it is a QR code, today so commonly used to read restaurant menus with the cell phone. “You can be completely ignorant of our time and still these files could be understood if you have light, you have something that captures that light, like a camera, and a computer or a platform that uses the language of zeros and ones,” adds the expert.
The combination of robust, long-term storage technology that cannot be hacked, that is easy to decode, and stored in remote conditions, is what has encouraged so many institutions to store the treasures of human memory there. However, Professor Gustavo Villanueva Bazán remembers that there is always something that is lost in digital files: “In that distant future we will not know about the media,” he says. It will not be known if the documents were made on parchment or on white paper and what it was like to feel that paper, if the painting was painted on cloth or canvas, if the walls of the Taj Mahal when touched revealed the red sandstone from which it was made. “There is no way to preserve that for centuries.”
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