Can Knowledge be preserved in the long run?

TL;DR

This paper examines whether scientific knowledge can be reliably preserved over millennia, concluding that due to the inherent decay of information, indefinite preservation is fundamentally unlikely.

Contribution

It provides a philosophical and historical analysis showing the limitations of long-term knowledge preservation despite modern storage technologies.

Findings

Knowledge tends to decay over time despite fault-tolerant storage methods.

Historical evidence shows many past knowledge systems have been lost.

Long-term preservation of knowledge is fundamentally limited by information decay.

Abstract

Can (scientific) knowledge be reliably preserved over the long term? We have today very efficient and reliable methods to encode, store and retrieve data in a storage medium that is fault tolerant against many types of failures. But does this guarantee -- or does it even seem likely -- that all knowledge can be preserved over thousands of years and beyond? History shows that many types of knowledge that were known before have been lost. We observe that the nature of stored and communicated information and the way it is interpreted is such that it always tends to decay and therefore must lost eventually in the long term. The likely fundamental conclusion is that knowledge cannot be reliably preserved indefinitely.