  Can (scientific) knowledge be reliably preserved over the long term? We have
today very efficient and reliable methods to encode, store and retrieve data in
a storage medium that is fault tolerant against many types of failures. But
does this guarantee -- or does it even seem likely -- that all knowledge can be
preserved over thousands of years and beyond? History shows that many types of
knowledge that were known before have been lost. We observe that the nature of
stored and communicated information and the way it is interpreted is such that
it always tends to decay and therefore must lost eventually in the long term.
The likely fundamental conclusion is that knowledge cannot be reliably
preserved indefinitely.
