>But it's possible that civilizations that are hundreds of millions of years old exist. To such civilizations 100 years would be a flash in the pan. I don't kn

>But it's possible that civilizations that are hundreds of millions of years old exist. To such civilizations 100 years would be a flash in the pan. I don't know if it is possible for a civilization to connect the past to the present over such long periods of time. The individuals in each generation would have to pick up, use and pass on all the information that came before. Our capacity to take past information into account, individually and collectively, is very limited, even if it gets stored somewhere. We can see that in many debates on here where arguments of the past are repeated many times over without younger participants having any awareness of what's been said before. We can compensate for that to some degree by continuously retelling old stories. But relearning old stuff necessarily competes with new information for our limited mental capacity and so old information inevitable degrades over time. Even religions, where there is a strong emotional incentive to retell old stories, are struggling mightily with even understanding what the original authors meant by the words they used and how to apply any of it to the current situation. I think for a civilization to retain its collective memory over much longer periods of time requires completely different individuals. It requires individuals that are able to grow their mental capacity at the same pace as the amount of accumulated information grows. If you consider the combinatoric explosion, this is unimaginable in a biological organism based on evolution and ultimately even in an AI.