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It amazes me how much we still know from say 1000 years ago and how little we sometimes know about things just shy of 150 years.
by larusso 7y ago
It amazes me how much we still know from say 1000 years ago and how little we sometimes know about things just shy of 150 years.
- jobigoud 7y agoIt could also imply we don't really know most of the mundane details and intricacies of past cultures. Tricks and techniques lost to time forever. Like the difference between the many small things you experience when you are traveling somewhere compared to what's left in the pictures.
- reaperducer 7y agoNot so much "lost to time forever" as "locked away in physical media that makes them hard to access." We talk a lot about the seemingly infinite storage capabilities we have today, but all it takes is one terrorist attack, or one major SV company to go out of business and suddenly there's a massive hole in our cultural memory that cannot be recovered because everything we have is stored magnetically.
- WorldMaker 7y agoThere's also the "never written about because every one knew" common knowledge problem. It was a boring thing everyone knew, so why would they write about it?
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoJon Blow has an excellent talk titled "preventing the collapse of civilization" where he explores this.
- larusso 7y agoI always wonder how long it would take humanity to relearn certain things if some cataclysm would happen. And I don’t even mean the latest inventions in semiconductor industry. But things like metal, glass and woodworking. Crafts that took ages to evolve.
- ekianjo 7y agoWe don't know every single detail of the everyday life from 1000 years ago...
- larusso 7y agoTrue but that was not my point. I meant in documentation and details of everyday activity of certain people. But granted such small details might also be forgotten completely.
- mr__y 7y agoI'm pretty sure it's rather that there are a lot of things that are in "we don't know that we don't know" category