The Arctic Code Vault
- Dated
- Place
- Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway · The world's open source developers, as archived by GitHub with Piql and the Arctic World Archive
- Coordinates
- 78° 14′ N · 15° 28′ E (approximate)
- Remains
- Intact
PiqlAS, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsCC-BY-SA-4.0Original record
Data saver is on. Images load only when you ask. You can change this in Settings at any time.
From the archivist
This is a message this civilization knew it was sending.
On 2 February 2020 a company that hosted the code of millions of programmers froze a picture of all the active public projects in its care: operating systems and games, tools for scientists, the programs that ran websites and phones, the small experiments of students. Then it wrote them, not onto disks, but onto film.
The film holds its data as tiny dots of silver that can be read with a camera, and each reel begins with a guide, readable by eye, explaining how to decode the rest. Another reel explains, from the beginning, what software is and how computers work, in case the knowledge itself has been lost.
On 8 July 2020, 186 reels were carried into an old coal mine on Svalbard, far north of mainland Norway, and sealed in a steel container deep in the frozen mountain. They were meant to wait there for a thousand years.
We did not know who would find them. We left instructions anyway.
Established
- On 2 February 2020 GitHub took a snapshot of every active public repository on its platform to be archived (GitHub Archive Program).
- Its partner Piql wrote 21 terabytes of this code onto 186 reels of piqlFilm, a digital photosensitive archival film made of silver halide on polyester and designed to last about 1,000 years (GitHub Archive Program).
- The reels were deposited on 8 July 2020 in the Arctic World Archive, in a sealed chamber of a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, some 250 metres deep in the permafrost (GitHub).
- Each reel carries a human readable guide, in five languages, explaining how to recover the data, and a separate reel called the Tech Tree explains the history and workings of software (GitHub).
- The Arctic World Archive was opened in 2017 by the Norwegian company Piql inside Mine 3 near Longyearbyen (Arctic World Archive).
Interpretation
The claim of a thousand year life rests on accelerated ageing tests of the film, not on experience. Whether anyone in a distant future will be able or will want to read the code of the early twenty-first century, and whether the archive represents humanity or mainly the users of one American platform, are open questions; the project's own authors present it as a gesture as much as a backup.
In 10,000 years
In 10,000 years, if someone opens the mountain, will our instructions be enough for them to understand what we were doing?
Sources (4)
- GitHub Archive Program. Arctic Vault. · archiveprogram.github.com
- GitHub Blog. GitHub Archive Program: the journey of the world's open source code to the Arctic, July 2020. · github.blog
- Arctic World Archive. Arctic Vault: where data meets permafrost. · arcticworldarchive.org
- Piql. GitHub's code now stored forever on piqlFilm. · www.piql.com
Related fragments
1977
The Golden Record
Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 · Americas
1990 to 1993
The first web server
Meyrin, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland · Europe
1969 to 1990
A map of a new network: ARPANET
Los Angeles, California, United States · Americas