Arctic Archive Contributor
- 2 minsSome strange and exciting news:
Some code that I have written is going to be preserved in “remote, climate-controlled bunker” and stored below the permafrost of an Arctic mountain in the Svalbard archipelago.
My code, along with the work of thousands of others, is being encoded onto 3,500-foot film reels and plunged 300 meters deep into a decomissioned coal mine, where it will hopefully last for a least a thousand years.
It’s being included in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, and stored in the Arctic World Archive, a long-term data storage facility operated by the Norwegian firm Piql.
Along with Github’s film reels full of open-source code, the Arctic World Archive also stores the constitutions and important historical papers of the Norwegian, Brazillian, and Mexican governments, and has been used by the Vatican Library and National Museum of Norway to store digitized versions of important cultural works.
All of this is pretty wild to me. I know that the code I contributed to the snapshot of repositories that Github is encoding onto these reels is insignificant – it’s just the code for BotConnectFour. The reels will also include famous open source projects like Homebrew, React, and Node, and my code is dwarfed by these projects.
However, it’s still really significant. Even if these reels only survive for half of the predicted 1000 years, this code that I wrote, this silly little bot, it’s going to outlive me. If I happen to have an unbroken line of successors, it’ll still be preserved when my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren are alive (assuming the average generation is 35 years). That’s 14 generations – and 28 if the reels last the full millineum. I doubt my potential distant relatives will remember me by then – do you know who your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents are?
If I’d known this was going to happen, I would’ve included a little markdown file with a simple message to future generations in the repository. I don’t know what I would’ve said. Maybe I would’ve written a little introduction, posed some questions I’ve always wondered about the future, and wished them luck. Oh well – it’s too late now.
I’m actually kind of glad I missed that opportunity, because figuring out what to write in such a letter would’ve been daunting. What would you say to historians and archeologists reading something you wrote, 1000 years in the future?
Cristyn Howard
Software Developer. Dynamically-typed.