If you posted a task to GitHub before February 2 , the fruits of your labor movement are now likely entombed for a millennium in a frosty Ark of the Covenant . Yesterday , the world ’s largest source code repositoryannouncedthat , on July 8 , it enshrined its archive below hundreds of meters of permafrost in an Arctic hurdle , inside a chamber inside an give up mine inside a spate , on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard , inhabited by a few thousand people and polar bear . In other words , safe from the military force of real estate developers and influencers for the foreseeable futurity .
GitHub suppose that a snapshot of every combat-ready public repository and “ significant ” abeyant ones , taken February 2 , 2020 , has been printed on 186 3,500 - foot digital archival film reels , which are expected to last 1,000 years . ( They evenlooksomewhat sacred . ) GitHub finally plans to laser - scratch all active repositories onto quartz glass platters , to last over 10,000 yr .
If this sounds familiar , that ’s probably because GitHub partnered with the Long Now Foundation , which is famed for eternal saving projects such asits 10,000 year clock , still under mental synthesis , which is design to tick for 10,000 years inside a mountain ( onJeff Bezos ’s property , after a $ 42 million investment ) .
Image: Heiko Junge/AFP (Getty Images)
GitHub , an archive and living beehive for exposed - beginning projects , check design for retrace a digital landscape and expanding it . A technologically equipped alien could theoretically finesse its human programming skills through GitHub - hosted boot refugee camp software and use GitHub datato createa political machine - learn simulation to take aim a automaton to writein the style of Shakespeareand maybe even turn the resultant intoan animation . They may study ourprogramming languages , our arcaneoperating system , our app development frameworks , and ourcryptographic library . Given the time and will , they might describe their findings on aWordPress blog . If the aliens never go far , it still might come in ready to hand for digital up-to-dateness plunger , who willrest easyknowing that the code for Bitcoin is safe from almost any imaginable catastrophe .
The aliens will need to understand the instructions . The 21 TB of repository information have been package into TAR files and will be QR - code , so they may necessitate to reference GitHub ’s homo - decipherable manual of arms for “ QR decoding , file formats , character encryption , and other vital metadata . ”
The assumption and hope , though , is that whoever finds this will have a computer ; GitHub also inscribed each reelwith a template , like a readme single file , defining the principles of software . Before proceed on to explain the context of use of the projects , GitHub adds a disclaimer about the technical universe required for the preserved GitHub projects to work :
Reading , decoding , and uncompress this data will expect considerable computation itself . In hypothesis it could be done without computers , but it would be very tedious and difficult .
Our expectation is that you did n’t need our definition of software , computer , and other condition . We imagine you have computers of your own , credibly vastly more advanced than ours , and peradventure essentially otherwise architected . Once you understand the overview and guide below you will easily be able to access all of the data .
However , it ’s possible that you have deficient reckoner to ours , or even no figurer at all . In typesetter’s case of that eventuality , we have prepared an uncompressed , unencoded , human - readable spool of datum which we call the Tech Tree . The Tech Tree hold data about our fundamental technology , our computers , and our software , in the hope that , over metre , you will be capable to utilise this knowledge to recreate data processor that can make enjoyment of the undefended source software in this archive .
The “ Tech Tree , ” which GitHubdescribesas a “ Rosetta Stone ” for computing and software development , has been print on a separate human being - decipherable Scottish reel .
At this level , a post - apocalyptic letter of the alphabet to a succeeding airstream does n’t sound skittish at all . In the event of an immediate but not - apocalyptic cataclysm , GitHub is also archive by the Internet Archive , the Software Heritage Foundation , and the Bodleian Library .
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