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Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing a

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is stored in volatile documents and fragile minds. During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge. This means that a future generation will neither have the real artifacts in the ground nor our current documentation and all that knowledge about humanities history will be lost forever. Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
With launch costs coming down it'll soon be more practical to launch a satellite into orbit that can store this information for a long time.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Never to be found again
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Orbits decay, often at a plannable rate. Eventually it crashes back to earth and becomes an archeological relic for future explorers. I bet you could even design the sattelite to burn specatularly (in many colors) on the way down so it's more likely to be seen and sought after.
    - irrational 9y ago
      Though, it would most likely end up in the ocean since the majority of the earth's surface is covered by water.
      - ImSkeptical 9y ago
        Just put enough satellites so it's statically very likely that one will land on land. (Although I don't see the point of this project)
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      Orbits only really decay due to atmospheric drag. Other tiny bits of cosmic, rarified gas can slow the spacecraft on a long timescale, and solar radiation pressure can perturb an orbit (occasionally dramatically, if the Sun is unhappy), but the effect is far smaller than constant drag. If a small satellite is orbiting Earth at a high enough altitude which was calculated to consider the broader gravitational system (Earth's natural satellites, the Sun, and fainter perturbations from nearby celestial objects have to be factored in), orbit can be designed to be stable on a long, long timescale. Millions of years, or more. The real fly in your plan's ointment would be exposure to space, which sucks a lot for electronics.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
        I don't think that's a, uh, "fly in my plan's ointment". I don't think the satellite needs electronics at all.
        jsmthrowaway 9y ago
        Those are called ballistic projectiles, and you cannot place one in a precise orbit. You need upper-stage guidance, admittedly just for the placement of the satellite, but you still need electronics. Though, that being said, I'm now curious how you intend to store large-scale data without any use of electronics.
        9y ago
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Stuff in the middle of a lot of not-stuff is fairly findable. Particularly if it has a strong signature on radar or microwave imaging.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      I was thinking in the case the civilization lost access to a lot of basic data. Then finding the magic satellite without magic radar, maybe without even knowing about the magic satellite amongst all the other satellites up there.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        A billion years is a long time. That said, a few redundant copies elsewhere wouldn't hurt.
        jacobush 9y ago
        Oh, no I love the idea of a time capsule in space. In fact, given how cheap some mylar (for detection) and silicon (for inscribing information) is, I think "we" (humanity) should put a bunch of it up there. Like they Voyager probes, but MUCH more data, and maybe in orbit around the sun. But it's not something to rely upon as backups - but very nice as a message into curious explorers of the future.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        A deep cave structure on the moon, and large triangles formed into the lunarscape visible from telescope on earth pointing towards the entrance. Bonus: You'll probably spur space development technology faster than normal for any civilization that can see it.
        dredmorbius 9y ago
        Bury a bunch of magnets ....
    - _jal 9y ago
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  Sounds like it's a safer option, but requires that you have the technology and energy sources to communicate with that satellite - which is not really 100% reliable if you are about to experience a planet-wide catastrophe of such magnitude that it would require storing data outside of the Earth surface in a first place.
  - moftz 9y ago
    You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.
    - sigstoat 9y ago
      > You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done. > Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would. chunks of satellites are far more likely to survive reentry already than you might expect. i expect it would be feasible now to produce an insert sphere filled with information etched on nickel-superalloy plates that would survive uncontrolled reentry and impact with the earth's surface. i'd suggest storing the information in something covered with retro-reflectors, and dropping it onto the moon's surface, though. need more delta-V to get it there and retrieve it, but it'd be a simpler object to construct, and then later deconstruct.
      - moftz 9y ago
        You can calculate an estimate of reentry from atmospheric drag. It's not going to be exact but anything you throw up into LEO is going to come down someday and as long as the atmosphere doesn't change too much, it should be fairly close. http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/Space%20Weather/Space%20Weather%20Effects/SatelliteOrbitalDecayCalculations.pdf http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/Space%20Weath...
willvarfar 9y ago
Current archeologists only excavate sites 'at risk' e.g. new building development or looting. In all other cases, they strive to do non-intrusive exploration e.g. ground penetrating radar and lidar.
- sandos 9y ago
  Why isnt radar used for pyramid? If we have ground-penetrating radar it should work for pyramids, no?
  - willvarfar 9y ago
    It is. Particularly for finding tunnels and chambers near the surface.
  - kaybe 9y ago
    It usually doesn't go very deep, especially in dry rock.
dominotw 9y ago
save them from isis and rebels ? Better in museums than on ebay.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Seems to me that stuff sitting in museums is more vulnerable to such bad actors than stuff sitting under a meter of dirt.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  Unless ISS loots the museums, which is also in their playbook.
- eternalban 9y ago
  https://web.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/the-2003-looting-of-the-iraq-national-museum https://web.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/the-2003-looti...
krapp 9y ago
Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain. Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon landings, and much of the knowledge of how the software written back then will die out when the engineers who worked on them do, because software knowledge isn't passed on generationally the way culture and language are. It's likely that archaeologists from the year 4017 will be picking through our garbage, rather than our software, and that their ability to accomplish the latter will depend entirely on whether they find a "Rosetta Stone" in the former that lets them reconstruct everything from first principles.
- mc32 9y ago
  For the most part you want to remove access to these artifacts from "graverobbers" who could not care any less about historical or any other value than how much they can get --which is often peanuts compared to their historical value, or what is paid by collectors.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisBland 9y ago
  Somewhere, someone has thrown away a copy of Javascript the good parts, that will be humanity's saving grace.
- dkersten 9y ago
  > Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. I've been on a bit of a wikipedia binge recently: Its actually even older than that. Babylonia was the Akkadian country that used cuneiform, but Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets exist that are much older still!
- _nedR 9y ago
  Related (Although it is a project to preserve a record of the world's languages and not archaeological knowledge) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project "The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages."
chrisseaton 9y ago
> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage ...but that's museums books, which you just criticised.
jmnicolas 9y ago
Einstein said "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." I don't think archeology will be of much concern after WWIII.
- EGreg 9y ago
  This. And we don't even need WW3. Consider the amount of desertification, greenhouse gases, and reduction of biodiversity and extrapolate.
- irrational 9y ago
  Well, not immediately after WWIII. But, possibly, eventually after sufficient millennia have passed.
paulsutter 9y ago
The Internet Archive has that goal (archive.org), it’s paid for by Brewster Kahle personally. > Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct
- dkersten 9y ago
  I hope they're recording all of the data on stone tablets in cuneiform, instead of in some digital format for which reading hardware will be obsolete in a few years... ;-)
  - iamben 9y ago
    I remember reading about this a while back (probably on HN). They're storing a bunch of data along with the OSs and devices to read it in a bunker in Switzerland, so if we do leave a bunch of digital data, future generations can actually access it. Tried to find a decent article, but this was about the best I could do: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp
    - acqq 9y ago
      "They" in that case aren't the "Internet Archive" but the European research projects about the digital preservation. The Internet Archive collects the donations now for the Canada site: "this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because lots of copies keeps stuff safe. We estimate this will cost $5 million. With your support, we are more than halfway there." https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
    - dkersten 9y ago
      How long does a turned off device stay operational? (main circuitry itself, screen, battery, storage -- whatever the devices they're using have) Also, we were able to decipher cuneiform because there were a lot of clay tablets available to study, but will people in, say, 2k to 4k years from now be able to decipher how to work the devices, its OS and access the library of data? Even my iPhone requires a surprisingly large amount of knowledge to access my various bits of data, if it were 4,000 years in the future and nobody understands English anymore, I can imagine it would be difficult to decipher. Perhaps we should be leaving a load of stone carvings somehow explaining how to operate the devices (and to read english, or whatever language) From the linked article: > "If we can nail the next 100 years, we figure we will be able to nail the next 100 years as well," Farquhar said. Except.. if there is a massive disaster event of sorts (WW3 was mentioned in the comments here), it may be longer than 100 years before somebody is in a position to access this archive. It may then be too late. Or the country is in crisis and the facility gets decommissioned or abandoned. I'm not saying they're not doing a great thing -- they are! I'm just concerned that it relies on a bit of luck.
kbenson 9y ago
> During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge. And during no particular war at all, the local government may decide to demolish artifacts and sites for political reasons. For example, China and Tibetan statues and temples. I'm not sure the original locations are very safe either. Edit: I was actually incorrectly remembering Chinese mining destruction in Afghanistan.[1] I'm not aware of a direct attack on Tibetan artifacts by China beyond their actions to repress the religion in general. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/how-chinese-mining-is-destroying-afghanistans-historic-ruins/241808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho...
- wolfi1 9y ago
  regarding Tibetan artifacts and buildings. any pointers? I can't believe that statement in general. (if you would have mentioned the Taliban in Afghanistan on the other hand ...)
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=Tibetan+demolition https://www.google.com/search?q=Tibetan+demolition
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I was actually thinking of Chinese mining in Afghanistan[1], but couldn't remember all the context. In searching before posting to make sure I wasn't incorrect, I did run across reports of China destroying Tibetan monasteries.[2][3] That said, from looking a bit closer at the articles now, it looks more like China's continued attack on the religion, and not the artifacts themselves, since it's targeting homes next to a monastery (which happen to house people who work at the monastery, if the reporting is to be interpreted correctly, which isn't easy on this topic because it appears reporters are trying to strongly imply something without saying it, which is a red flag). 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/how-chinese-mining-is-destroying-afghanistans-historic-ruins/241808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho... 2: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36863888 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36863888 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/world/asia/china-tibet-larung-gar-sertar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/world/asia/china-tibet-la...
wmil 9y ago
> Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about? That's not really an archaeologist problem. But there are a few projects to do things like print off wikipedia on low acid paper and store it in vaults. Also the memory of mankind project is storing ceramic tablets in a salt mine. https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/ https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledge-is-being-buried-in-a-salt-mine http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledg...
coldtea 9y ago
>Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about? That's an interesting project on it's own (and there are various types of "capsules" -- from knowledge to seeds) but it's not particularly relevant to archeology. Archeological info to be retained is just an small subset of knowledge to be retained in general (e.g. scientific, technological, state records, cultural (music, literature, movies), software, historical, etc).
- tke248 9y ago
  I think the http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/ foundation has a few related projects
exabrial 9y ago
On a similar note, look at what happened in Iraq during the ISIS rein. Thousands of ancient monuments were destroyed :(
solotronics 9y ago
why not make long term digital storage for things like this? I would donate for a project like this.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

With launch costs coming down it'll soon be more practical to launch a satellite into orbit that can store this information for a long time.

jacobush 9y ago
Never to be found again
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Orbits decay, often at a plannable rate. Eventually it crashes back to earth and becomes an archeological relic for future explorers. I bet you could even design the sattelite to burn specatularly (in many colors) on the way down so it's more likely to be seen and sought after.
  - irrational 9y ago
    Though, it would most likely end up in the ocean since the majority of the earth's surface is covered by water.
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      Just put enough satellites so it's statically very likely that one will land on land. (Although I don't see the point of this project)
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    Orbits only really decay due to atmospheric drag. Other tiny bits of cosmic, rarified gas can slow the spacecraft on a long timescale, and solar radiation pressure can perturb an orbit (occasionally dramatically, if the Sun is unhappy), but the effect is far smaller than constant drag. If a small satellite is orbiting Earth at a high enough altitude which was calculated to consider the broader gravitational system (Earth's natural satellites, the Sun, and fainter perturbations from nearby celestial objects have to be factored in), orbit can be designed to be stable on a long, long timescale. Millions of years, or more. The real fly in your plan's ointment would be exposure to space, which sucks a lot for electronics.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      I don't think that's a, uh, "fly in my plan's ointment". I don't think the satellite needs electronics at all.
      - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
        Those are called ballistic projectiles, and you cannot place one in a precise orbit. You need upper-stage guidance, admittedly just for the placement of the satellite, but you still need electronics. Though, that being said, I'm now curious how you intend to store large-scale data without any use of electronics.
        9y ago
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Stuff in the middle of a lot of not-stuff is fairly findable. Particularly if it has a strong signature on radar or microwave imaging.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    I was thinking in the case the civilization lost access to a lot of basic data. Then finding the magic satellite without magic radar, maybe without even knowing about the magic satellite amongst all the other satellites up there.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      A billion years is a long time. That said, a few redundant copies elsewhere wouldn't hurt.
      - jacobush 9y ago
        Oh, no I love the idea of a time capsule in space. In fact, given how cheap some mylar (for detection) and silicon (for inscribing information) is, I think "we" (humanity) should put a bunch of it up there. Like they Voyager probes, but MUCH more data, and maybe in orbit around the sun. But it's not something to rely upon as backups - but very nice as a message into curious explorers of the future.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      A deep cave structure on the moon, and large triangles formed into the lunarscape visible from telescope on earth pointing towards the entrance. Bonus: You'll probably spur space development technology faster than normal for any civilization that can see it.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Bury a bunch of magnets ....
  - _jal 9y ago
ivanhoe 9y ago
Sounds like it's a safer option, but requires that you have the technology and energy sources to communicate with that satellite - which is not really 100% reliable if you are about to experience a planet-wide catastrophe of such magnitude that it would require storing data outside of the Earth surface in a first place.
- moftz 9y ago
  You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    > You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done. > Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would. chunks of satellites are far more likely to survive reentry already than you might expect. i expect it would be feasible now to produce an insert sphere filled with information etched on nickel-superalloy plates that would survive uncontrolled reentry and impact with the earth's surface. i'd suggest storing the information in something covered with retro-reflectors, and dropping it onto the moon's surface, though. need more delta-V to get it there and retrieve it, but it'd be a simpler object to construct, and then later deconstruct.
    - moftz 9y ago
      You can calculate an estimate of reentry from atmospheric drag. It's not going to be exact but anything you throw up into LEO is going to come down someday and as long as the atmosphere doesn't change too much, it should be fairly close. http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/Space%20Weather/Space%20Weather%20Effects/SatelliteOrbitalDecayCalculations.pdf http://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Category/Educational/Space%20Weath...

willvarfar 9y ago

Current archeologists only excavate sites 'at risk' e.g. new building development or looting. In all other cases, they strive to do non-intrusive exploration e.g. ground penetrating radar and lidar.

sandos 9y ago
Why isnt radar used for pyramid? If we have ground-penetrating radar it should work for pyramids, no?
- willvarfar 9y ago
  It is. Particularly for finding tunnels and chambers near the surface.
- kaybe 9y ago
  It usually doesn't go very deep, especially in dry rock.

dominotw 9y ago

save them from isis and rebels ? Better in museums than on ebay.

maxerickson 9y ago
Seems to me that stuff sitting in museums is more vulnerable to such bad actors than stuff sitting under a meter of dirt.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Unless ISS loots the museums, which is also in their playbook.
eternalban 9y ago
https://web.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/the-2003-looting-of-the-iraq-national-museum https://web.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/the-2003-looti...

krapp 9y ago

Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain. Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon landings, and much of the knowledge of how the software written back then will die out when the engineers who worked on them do, because software knowledge isn't passed on generationally the way culture and language are. It's likely that archaeologists from the year 4017 will be picking through our garbage, rather than our software, and that their ability to accomplish the latter will depend entirely on whether they find a "Rosetta Stone" in the former that lets them reconstruct everything from first principles.

mc32 9y ago
For the most part you want to remove access to these artifacts from "graverobbers" who could not care any less about historical or any other value than how much they can get --which is often peanuts compared to their historical value, or what is paid by collectors.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ChrisBland 9y ago
Somewhere, someone has thrown away a copy of Javascript the good parts, that will be humanity's saving grace.
dkersten 9y ago
> Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. I've been on a bit of a wikipedia binge recently: Its actually even older than that. Babylonia was the Akkadian country that used cuneiform, but Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets exist that are much older still!
_nedR 9y ago
Related (Although it is a project to preserve a record of the world's languages and not archaeological knowledge) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project "The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages."

chrisseaton 9y ago

> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage ...but that's museums books, which you just criticised.

jmnicolas 9y ago

Einstein said "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." I don't think archeology will be of much concern after WWIII.

EGreg 9y ago
This. And we don't even need WW3. Consider the amount of desertification, greenhouse gases, and reduction of biodiversity and extrapolate.
irrational 9y ago
Well, not immediately after WWIII. But, possibly, eventually after sufficient millennia have passed.

paulsutter 9y ago

The Internet Archive has that goal (archive.org), it’s paid for by Brewster Kahle personally. > Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct

dkersten 9y ago
I hope they're recording all of the data on stone tablets in cuneiform, instead of in some digital format for which reading hardware will be obsolete in a few years... ;-)
- iamben 9y ago
  I remember reading about this a while back (probably on HN). They're storing a bunch of data along with the OSs and devices to read it in a bunker in Switzerland, so if we do leave a bunch of digital data, future generations can actually access it. Tried to find a decent article, but this was about the best I could do: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp
  - acqq 9y ago
    "They" in that case aren't the "Internet Archive" but the European research projects about the digital preservation. The Internet Archive collects the donations now for the Canada site: "this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because lots of copies keeps stuff safe. We estimate this will cost $5 million. With your support, we are more than halfway there." https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
  - dkersten 9y ago
    How long does a turned off device stay operational? (main circuitry itself, screen, battery, storage -- whatever the devices they're using have) Also, we were able to decipher cuneiform because there were a lot of clay tablets available to study, but will people in, say, 2k to 4k years from now be able to decipher how to work the devices, its OS and access the library of data? Even my iPhone requires a surprisingly large amount of knowledge to access my various bits of data, if it were 4,000 years in the future and nobody understands English anymore, I can imagine it would be difficult to decipher. Perhaps we should be leaving a load of stone carvings somehow explaining how to operate the devices (and to read english, or whatever language) From the linked article: > "If we can nail the next 100 years, we figure we will be able to nail the next 100 years as well," Farquhar said. Except.. if there is a massive disaster event of sorts (WW3 was mentioned in the comments here), it may be longer than 100 years before somebody is in a position to access this archive. It may then be too late. Or the country is in crisis and the facility gets decommissioned or abandoned. I'm not saying they're not doing a great thing -- they are! I'm just concerned that it relies on a bit of luck.

kbenson 9y ago

> During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge. And during no particular war at all, the local government may decide to demolish artifacts and sites for political reasons. For example, China and Tibetan statues and temples. I'm not sure the original locations are very safe either. Edit: I was actually incorrectly remembering Chinese mining destruction in Afghanistan.[1] I'm not aware of a direct attack on Tibetan artifacts by China beyond their actions to repress the religion in general. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/how-chinese-mining-is-destroying-afghanistans-historic-ruins/241808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho...

wolfi1 9y ago
regarding Tibetan artifacts and buildings. any pointers? I can't believe that statement in general. (if you would have mentioned the Taliban in Afghanistan on the other hand ...)
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=Tibetan+demolition https://www.google.com/search?q=Tibetan+demolition
- kbenson 9y ago
  I was actually thinking of Chinese mining in Afghanistan[1], but couldn't remember all the context. In searching before posting to make sure I wasn't incorrect, I did run across reports of China destroying Tibetan monasteries.[2][3] That said, from looking a bit closer at the articles now, it looks more like China's continued attack on the religion, and not the artifacts themselves, since it's targeting homes next to a monastery (which happen to house people who work at the monastery, if the reporting is to be interpreted correctly, which isn't easy on this topic because it appears reporters are trying to strongly imply something without saying it, which is a red flag). 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/how-chinese-mining-is-destroying-afghanistans-historic-ruins/241808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/ho... 2: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36863888 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36863888 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/world/asia/china-tibet-larung-gar-sertar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/world/asia/china-tibet-la...

wmil 9y ago

> Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about? That's not really an archaeologist problem. But there are a few projects to do things like print off wikipedia on low acid paper and store it in vaults. Also the memory of mankind project is storing ceramic tablets in a salt mine. https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/ https://www.memory-of-mankind.com/ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledge-is-being-buried-in-a-salt-mine http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledg...

coldtea 9y ago

>Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about? That's an interesting project on it's own (and there are various types of "capsules" -- from knowledge to seeds) but it's not particularly relevant to archeology. Archeological info to be retained is just an small subset of knowledge to be retained in general (e.g. scientific, technological, state records, cultural (music, literature, movies), software, historical, etc).

tke248 9y ago
I think the http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/ foundation has a few related projects

exabrial 9y ago

On a similar note, look at what happened in Iraq during the ISIS rein. Thousands of ancient monuments were destroyed :(

solotronics 9y ago

why not make long term digital storage for things like this? I would donate for a project like this.