Retro gaming in general is about re-enacting the consumption of games, I have never though that you can also re-enact the development/production of them :) Good work!
Surviving artifacts are not a very good and coherent source of information for future archeologists, alien or human. After all, we are still kind of unsure about construction methods of Egyptian pyramids, which are less than 5000 years old.
And past civilizations at least seemed to have cared much more about longevity of their creations than we do, we can not even store our digital photos reliably over a decade without active replication. Without projects like this, future researchers will have to put the whole picture together using only plastic bottles and broken vinyl records :)
I've started using M-DISC Blu-rays for my backups, which are supposed to last for quite a long time. I don't know how long they will actually last in real-world conditions, but I'm hoping its long enough that if I ever need them, they'll still work.
As for preserving things for future generations, I don't know of any good storage techniques. The problem with M-DISCs and other mad-high-density digital storage is that the readers will (most likely) be completely unavailable long before the all of the discs have degraded.
Perhaps we should engrave our data in 2D barcodes, alongside some readable instructions describing how the data can be decoded... Wouldn't have anywhere near the density of optical, magnetic or flash storage though. The whole situation does "worry" me a little, I agree entirely about future researchers not having much to go on.
I think there was not a giant leap in perception - high-altitude balloons were quite common during 1930's and the curvature, clouds etc look the same at 20km and 100km from the qualitative point of view.
I think that from all the modern ways of storing information, vinyl might be one of the most resilient. Archeologists will dig out and put together pieces of vinyl on the year 5014, like they do with ancient pottery today.
We probably will be known as "the great lovemaking civilization" despite all the atrocities commited, because of all the sleazy pop songs pressed on millions of vinyl records. I bet the ancient greeks would have put much more effort into factual accuracy of their pottery decoration too, if they only knew.
It works. Arduino, Makerbot, DIYDrones and a couple of others had 1M+ yearly revenues in 2010, they probably have all grown since then. Open source hardware is probably easier to commercialize than software, because it still has to be manufactured by someone.
Your data is a bit outdated, currently about 20% of the electricity produced in Estonia comes from renewable sources (biofuel, wind) and the figure is growing rapidly.
Plus the electric cars can only buy renewable energy, it would nullify the point of selling CO2 quotas if they used fossil fuel to produce that energy ;)
