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> It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still readable in their original language. What little of them survived, and only because fo

by creshal 10y ago

> It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still readable in their original language. What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Etruscan or even Egyptian texts of the same period, not so much (the Rosetta stone was a chance find). Even with Ancient Greek, we're limited to a very, very small fraction of the original corpus. > I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000 Between copyright laws trying to punish people for preserving texts, DRM attempting to make it impossible; and storage moving to very ephemeral media (paper easily survives centuries, magnetic or optical storage maybe decades), I'm not that optimistic that our data will survive the next mass disruption on the scale of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

samastur 10y ago
Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet. A good deal of those that also contain mundane things like shopping lists so it is unlikely they were preserved because of deliberate long term effort. Regretfully I don't have sources for this other than talking to a friend years ago who was in fact one of those people studying them.
- creshal 10y ago
  IIRC that's more a phenomenon with clay tablets than papyri – and it's an anomaly because of a rather unique combination of extremely sturdy media (clay tablets especially) and extremely well-preserving environmental conditions (dry deserts). And without the Rosetta stone, they'd be incomprehensible still. Preserving texts and preserving knowledge of a language are two separate problems.
mseebach 10y ago
I think your outlook is unnecessarily bleak. While you're right DRM certainly contributes to the unlikelihood that all, or even most, of current digital culture will survive, that's not the relevant bar to clear IMO. If even a single copy of a 20th century encyclopaedia survives (never mind a Wikipedia dump! No DRM there), the 120th century will have a vastly richer corpus of knowledge about the 20th century than we do about the 1st century (probably any pre-Gutenberg century).
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
>What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Before written texts, there was an oral tradition that has been lost almost entirely. Epic poetry was learned and recited to order in a semi-improvised way, not written down. Long term digital storage will have the same problem. Currently we store text and pictures, because that's what we've always done. We also store music and moving images, which are a slightly newer concept. Why should technology stop there? Next we'll have VR imagery, procedurally generated arts that are created from code - which will need hardware and an OS to run - and eventually holographic storage. There may even be direct brain interfaces - not just in the sense of experiencing the inside of someone else's head, but also in the sense that all those experiences can be mined for patterns, shaped, generated synthetically, and so on. So text will go the way of epic poetry. It'll be an interesting throwback studied by a few academic AIs, but irrelevant for daily use, because cultural representations will become denser, more abstract, more collective, and inherently interactive.
- mseebach 10y ago
  But 2000 year old oral epic poetry isn't irrelevant for daily use, it's lost. That's an important distinction. (That said, we do have epic poems like the Odyssey and the Iliad that are far from irrelevant if not exactly in daily use) I have no expectation that 2016-Wikipedia will play any role what so ever in 12026 daily life, what with 3D hologram beamed straight into peoples brains and flying cars and all -- but I'm almost certain it will be readily available to academics that are interested for whatever reason, and the "1780-2017 The Democracy Experiment" chapter in history books of the time will largely be accurate, because of this.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  In the "Eon" books by Greg Bear, future civilizations communicate by "picting", which is essentially rapid-fire memes or emojis that are projected from a special necklace everyone wears, combined with minimal verbal cues.

by creshal 10y ago

samastur 10y ago

Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet. A good deal of those that also contain mundane things like shopping lists so it is unlikely they were preserved because of deliberate long term effort. Regretfully I don't have sources for this other than talking to a friend years ago who was in fact one of those people studying them.

creshal 10y ago
IIRC that's more a phenomenon with clay tablets than papyri – and it's an anomaly because of a rather unique combination of extremely sturdy media (clay tablets especially) and extremely well-preserving environmental conditions (dry deserts). And without the Rosetta stone, they'd be incomprehensible still. Preserving texts and preserving knowledge of a language are two separate problems.

mseebach 10y ago

I think your outlook is unnecessarily bleak. While you're right DRM certainly contributes to the unlikelihood that all, or even most, of current digital culture will survive, that's not the relevant bar to clear IMO. If even a single copy of a 20th century encyclopaedia survives (never mind a Wikipedia dump! No DRM there), the 120th century will have a vastly richer corpus of knowledge about the 20th century than we do about the 1st century (probably any pre-Gutenberg century).

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

>What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Before written texts, there was an oral tradition that has been lost almost entirely. Epic poetry was learned and recited to order in a semi-improvised way, not written down. Long term digital storage will have the same problem. Currently we store text and pictures, because that's what we've always done. We also store music and moving images, which are a slightly newer concept. Why should technology stop there? Next we'll have VR imagery, procedurally generated arts that are created from code - which will need hardware and an OS to run - and eventually holographic storage. There may even be direct brain interfaces - not just in the sense of experiencing the inside of someone else's head, but also in the sense that all those experiences can be mined for patterns, shaped, generated synthetically, and so on. So text will go the way of epic poetry. It'll be an interesting throwback studied by a few academic AIs, but irrelevant for daily use, because cultural representations will become denser, more abstract, more collective, and inherently interactive.

mseebach 10y ago
But 2000 year old oral epic poetry isn't irrelevant for daily use, it's lost. That's an important distinction. (That said, we do have epic poems like the Odyssey and the Iliad that are far from irrelevant if not exactly in daily use) I have no expectation that 2016-Wikipedia will play any role what so ever in 12026 daily life, what with 3D hologram beamed straight into peoples brains and flying cars and all -- but I'm almost certain it will be readily available to academics that are interested for whatever reason, and the "1780-2017 The Democracy Experiment" chapter in history books of the time will largely be accurate, because of this.
snowwrestler 10y ago
In the "Eon" books by Greg Bear, future civilizations communicate by "picting", which is essentially rapid-fire memes or emojis that are projected from a special necklace everyone wears, combined with minimal verbal cues.