[Publius6961]

Why not?? Paper photographs have lasted 100 years. Tintypes have lasted 100 years. Cave paintings have lasted 1000+ years.

Apples and oranges.
The people who worry the most, like the Library of Congress and worldwide banks, are not amused by the uncertainty of the current technology. On the other hand, I am sure they would not worry if they could record the billions of daily transactions with paint on cave walls. If they could.

[daylate-dollarshort]

There ARE archival CD's.

While digital storage mediums are not permanent in and of themselves, they do offer longer life than films and photographic prints, and most importantly, the images they contain can simply be copied to new/fresh medium without any image quality loss, thereby perpetually extending the lifetime of the original image.

This is a standard CD.

This is an archival quality CD approximately 3 years old. The data still works and is more than 3 years old. It cost 10 times as much as standard CD's