This was the idea, started I think by Doug Carlston and Danny Hillis, of
giving some valued set of bits the chance at perpetual life by putting it
on two parallel paths, slow and fast. Slow to keep intact, fast to keep in
use and alive. If the fast path is broken, it has a backup. If it wanders
too far, it has a reliable "original" to check back with, even over
centuries.
We imagined a digital canon, say of the great books. Call the slow version
the "Golden Canon." Once collected and made fairly perfect, it is
inscribed on an extremely durable medium. Call the fast version the
"Living Canon." It invites intense and constant use, thus diligently kept
up from platform to platform and version to version and medium to medium.
If that chain of use is ever broken---inadvertantly or through disuse---it
can be rebooted from Golden Canon with only a little difficulty. If users
feel that important discontinuity has been introduced in the Living Canon
incrementally over time, there is a "pure" Golden version available for
comparison.
The Long Now Foundation, with Brewster Kahle's help, is planning to
generate a prototype Golden Canon, probably of great books. This gives us
a way of testing the two-path concept and of testing long-term storage
media (where "long" means thousands of years), and of showing the success
or failure publicly. The Living Canon version may well be conducted on the
Net. The Golden Canon version might be embedded in the prototype
10,000-year Clock we're building.
Here's my additional thought...
A Living Canon of, say, 1000 "great books" will change its content in
important ways over time, as well as its media. New translations of
ancient or foreign-language texts will come along. Some new works will
enter the literary canon and some may depart. So... maybe the chiseling of
the Golden Canon should be periodic rather than just once.
Start with a Golden Canon (and parallel Living Canon) of 1000 great books
in the year 2000. By 2010 or 2020 there will be significant, though small
by volume, changes---new translations, maybe new editions, new titles on
the list. Great: make a 2010 Golden Canon, perhaps on an even better
long-term storage medium. It might include the 2000 Canon, or it might
only refer to it, in a backward-compatible way.
The decade-incremental canon of great books would become valuable in its
own right. In effect, the Golden Canon moves from static to slow (with the
static option always kept, and all of the pasts always kept). This may
prove to be a more lively and useful linkage to the busy activity of the
Living Canon version...
What do you think?