If you posted a project on GitHub before February 2, the fruits of your work are probably now buried for a millennium in a frozen ark. Yesterday, the world’s largest source code repository Announced who, on July 8, consecrated his archive under hundreds of meters of permafrost in an arctic vault, inside a chamber inside an abandoned mine inside a mountain, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, inhabited by a few thousand people and polar bears. In other words, safe from the forces of real estate developers and influencers for the foreseeable future.
GitHub says a snapshot of each “significant” active and inactive public repository, taken on February 2, 2020, was printed on 186 reels of 3,500-foot digital archival film, expected to last 1,000 years. (They Look something sacred.) GitHub finally plans to laser etch all the active repositories on quartz glass plates, to last for over 10,000 years.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because GitHub partnered with the Long Now Foundation, famous for its eternal preservation projects like his 10,000 year clock, still under construction, which is designed to operate for 10,000 years inside a mountain (in Property of Jeff Bezos, after an investment of $ 42 million).
GitHub, a file and a living hive for open source projects, contains blueprints for rebuilding and expanding a digital landscape. A technologically equipped alien could, in theory, hone its human programming skills through GitHub-hosted boot camp software and use GitHub data create a machine learning model to train a robot to write in the style of Shakespeare and maybe even turn the result into an animation. You can study our programming languages, our arcane operating systems, our application development frameworks, and ours crypto libraries. Given time and will, they could describe their findings in a WordPress blog. If aliens never arrive, it could still be useful to digital currency speculators, who will. be calm knowing that the code for Bitcoin is safe from almost any imaginable catastrophe.
Aliens should read the instructions. The 21TB of repository data has been packed into TAR files and will have a QR code, so you may need to consult the GitHub human-readable manual for “QR decoding, file formats, character encodings and other critical metadata “
G / O Media may receive a commission
The presumption and hope, however, is that whoever finds this will have a computer; GitHub also entered each reel with a guidelike a readI file, defining the principles of the software. Before continuing to explain the context of the projects, GitHub adds a disclaimer about the technological universe required for preservation GitHub projects to work:
Reading, decoding, and decompressing this data will require considerable calculation in itself. In theory, it could be done without computers, but it would be very tedious and difficult.
Our expectation is that you do not need our definitions of software, computer, and other terms. We imagine that it has its own computers, probably much more advanced than ours, and possibly with a fundamentally different architecture. Once you understand the overview and guide below, you can easily access all the data.
However, it is possible that you have inferior computers to ours, or even none. In case of that eventuality, we have prepared a reel of uncompressed, unencoded, human-readable data that we call the tech tree. The tech tree contains information about our core technologies, our computers, and our software, hoping that, over time, you can use this knowledge to recreate computers that can make use of the open source software in this file.
The “tech tree” which GitHub describes As a “Rosetta Stone” for computing and software development, it has been printed on a separate human-readable reel.
At this point, a post-apocalyptic letter to a future race It doesn’t sound creepy at all. In the event of an immediate but not apocalyptic catastrophe, GitHub is also archived by the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation and the Bodleian Library.
.
