内容摘要：After graduating, he became a software developer, but had to change careers when his eyesight deteriorated.

After graduating, he became a software developer, but had to change careers when his eyesight deteriorated.

Programming languages, AI tools, and every active public repository on its platform, written by its 150 million users, are also stored here."It's incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software, it's become so critical to our day to day lives," Githhub's chief operating officer, Kyle Daigle tells the BBC.

His firm has explored a variety of long-term storage solutions, he said, and there are challenges. "Some of our existing mechanisms can be stored for a very long time, but you need technology to read them."At Piql's headquarters in southern Norway, data files are encoded onto photosensitive film."Data is a sequence of bits and bytes," explains senior product developer, Alexey Mantsev, as film ran through a spool at his fingertips.

"We convert the sequence of the bits which come from our clients data into images. Every image [or frame] is about eight million pixels."Once these images are exposed and developed, the processed film appears grey, but viewed more closely, it's similar to a mass of tiny QR codes.

The information can't be deleted or changed, and is easily retrievable explains Mr Mantsev.

"We can scan it back, and decode the data just the same way as reading data from a hard drive, but we will be reading data from the film."I don’t think I’ll be switching – I can’t help but like that real coffee is grown by people somewhere – but beanless coffee certainly left me thinking I should investigate the sustainability and ethics of my conventional brew.

Perhaps that does not sound like much. But in the US alone, where 767 million paperback books were sold in 2023, this is equivalent to the electricity use of more than 150,000 homes for a year.Forest loss, paper production and printing, and transport of books are generally the largest contributors to the carbon emissions of printed books.

So, using less wood fibre, and shipping lighter loads, are important ways to reduce the emissions of print books (as well as the costs of producing them).One simple method is reducing the thickness of the paper. Some publishers are turning to subtly thinner paper. There are limits to this: the most lightweight paper may be less durable. And for certain types of books, including art books, there’s a preference for heavier paper.