7 ms·

>This era will be a black hole in history. What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramo

>This era will be a black hole in history. What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here. I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.

Spooky23 10y ago
Civilization is fragile. We have the technology to make total war a suicide mission. But we have the hubris to destroy society from within.
Arizhel 10y ago
>I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Does humanity care about letting aliens know we once lived here long after we are gone? I doubt it. Without that political will, this expensive space graffiti will never happen.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Does "humanity"? I don't know. There's no way to know that without a poll. Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've managed to dig up. Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to destruction of our civilization. And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".

Spooky23 10y ago

Civilization is fragile. We have the technology to make total war a suicide mission. But we have the hubris to destroy society from within.

Arizhel 10y ago

>I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then. That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Does humanity care about letting aliens know we once lived here long after we are gone? I doubt it. Without that political will, this expensive space graffiti will never happen.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Does "humanity"? I don't know. There's no way to know that without a poll. Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've managed to dig up. Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to destruction of our civilization. And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".