@bonifartius while I certainly agree jpeg would be tricky to reconstruct from scratch I feel like a future civilization that is as advanced as us or more could crack it. I've seen far more difficult things reversed engineered before.

@freemo indeed. i think it's extra hard though because of the many layers (hardware, physical layout of bits & bytes, file format) :)

@bonifartius it is a good deal harder than alot of things.. but im sure anthropologists will figure it out, might take them a few years, but they will get it.

@freemo might be that i just have a pessimist view of human civilization :) who knows, maybe there will be some time left for earth so the bugs can take over :P

joke aside, some of the folks restoring old computers have really done astounding things!

@bonifartius I saw a man make a woman happy once, so I know for a fact anything is possible.

@hypolite well depends on just how next-gen you want to get.One I remember reading about a while back that had an almost infinite life was bits basically burned into crystals using lasers. But I also saw some dvd-like solutions that claimed would last hundreds of years, not sure if they ever wound up hitting the market.

I havent looked into the topic in some time but I know there were viable solutions on the horizon and some may have even become consumer ready I'm not sure.

@hypolite As I stated before these are technologies that are on the horizon and will likely become widely used in the near future... so yea, its counter to your case in the sense that right now we still use books, so things are still getting preserved that way. By the time books become extinct other methods of long-term data preservation will almost certainly be on the scene, making your point moot.

@hypolite only time will tell, but my point is, the tech is coming and prototypes viable. so its reasonable to expect it will happen.