The article I'll be talking about is the Arctic Code Vault.
I'm revisiting this article because I had heard about the Arctic Code Vault, but never really read into it just because I had zero idea of how GitHub worked at the time. Looking at it from what I know now, I find this effort to collect humanity's knowledge up until 2/2/2020 beyond fascinating. First and foremost, it makes me think about how we've chosen to archive what we know and how we've shared it in past years. The first thing that comes to mind is Carl Sagan's Golden Disc, released into space for any extra-terrestrial life to find and learn about the culture and diversity on earth. Although the vault is more likely to be used locally, I really admire the efforts made to preserve such important artifacts from Earth.
It also makes me wonder how history can be seen through these archives throughout the year. How can the code we've written throuhgout history change our perspective about world events. Or even more interestingly, can the code we've written reveal information about our history that we don't know yet. What patterns does it show? Does it reveal anything about issues that technology has prioritized? I would be really interesting to see the repos from the beginning of COVID-19 and see how much progress was made since.
I have always been fascinated by the Arctic Code Vault project. To think that contributions I've made will live for over 900 years after my death is incredible. One can only imagine the state of technology and the world in 1,000 years.
Firstly, I'd like to thank user: shaygyawali for sharing this article. I had heard about the Seed Vault and Golden Disc before, but this is the first time learning about the Artic Code Vault. My favourite thing about this vault is the preservation of Open Source Software. As markets move towards privatization, it is nice to think that projects which could be taken down in the future and made into a "for sale" product will be free and protected for the forseeable future.
Additionally, I'm not sure I agree that the vault will only be used locally. Depending on how optimistic you are about our inter-planetary struggle, I see this vault as a use case for building out software infrastructure on new planetary bodies, which is an exciting idea.
"I would be really interesting to see the repos from the beginning of COVID-19 and see how much progress was made since."
@shaygyawali you should check out this repo from user: owid here, it is a huge dataset containing vital covid information tracked globally.