9 ms·
I wonder what people 2000 years in the future would think if they stumbled upon the remains of my trinket collection? Would they recognise that its a collection
by moxvallix 5y ago
I wonder what people 2000 years in the future would think if they stumbled upon the remains of my trinket collection? Would they recognise that its a collection of things I found pretty, or would it be interpreted as a sorcerer's kit? Probably not if they had an understanding of our time period, but it's fun to imagine.
- keeler 5y agoI wonder as well. I've really enjoyed reading about all of the findings that have come out of Pompeii and Herculaneum in recent years: the graffiti[0], the fast food joint that looks like it could be a Chipotle or a Subway[1], and articles like this. It all feels pretty _recent_, even though it was 2000 years ago. I think that people 2000 years from now will have a lot more information about our time to go on, though. We disseminate and preserve information at a scale that did not exist back then. The sole surviving written record of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption -- and perhaps the earliest written record of any volcanic eruption -- comes from two letters written by Pliny the Younger.[2] Today, news of the event would be spread near-instantaneously (and presumably preserved in multiple locations), like news of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Back then, there was just the dissemination of paper(-like) copies. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrienne-was-here/475719/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie... [1] https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancient-fast-food-restaurant-discovered-in-pompeii https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancien... [2] https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/pliny.html https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...
- officialjunk 5y agoi fear a lot of our data will be lost, in particular digital data. it's already getting difficult to access data in formats/form-factors from within a single lifetime. from the decay of the magnetization to the details of encoding.
- WalterBright 5y agoEven if 99.9% is lost, that still leaves behind far more than we have about the Romans. I recall an hour-long history program on TV where a whole narrative was concocted out of the engraving of a gladiator's name on a stone.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago> Even if 99.9% is lost, that still leaves behind far more than we have about the Romans. Indeed, and due to complex historical factors, we have much more Roman writing than we have writing from other civilizations. It's important to remember that there are entire swathes of history and entire regions from where we have no actual history, only circumstantial writing by other peoples such as trading partners.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> and due to complex historical factors, we have much more Roman writing than we have writing from other civilizations. Most other civilizations, yes, but Mesopotamia is beating Rome hands down for availability of writing.
- fapjacks 5y agoIf you think decay of magnetization is the limiting factor to digital longevity, I'm sorry to report that intentional bitrot will destroy any hope of retrieval long before the spinning platters fail. I'd suggest an experiment: Think of some major news event you can remember from even 10 years ago, find a news story about it online, and then just follow the links contained therein. Not only is Google shaping what you can see, but so is everyone else. God bless the Internet Archive.
- lumberingjack 5y agoA lot of that information will be lost it costs a lot of money to store data on the internet nowadays when nobody's paying the bill it just gets lost. We bought an old tobacco farm in South Indiana almost every building it has these weird metal rings. historians said they were for tying up cattle and horses. But we found out recently that they were actually for farming equipment they would tether steam engines to ropes and then use these steel rings attached to buildings and trees to pull plows around with the steam engines.
- colechristensen 5y agoIn a lot of ways roman civilization fits much better into “nearly industrialized” than “millennia old” and you have to remember that a whole lot of what became western civilization was invented by romans. Really there were only a few missing big ideas and a few organizational failures in the way of, say, someone landing on the moon a thousand years ago. The fall of the empire set the species back perhaps as much as 1500 years.
- Macha 5y agoSimilar, I've wondered what pieces of popular fiction, if they were the only portion of modern material dug up by a future civilization, would be assumed to be religious texts.
- diegoperini 5y agoHarry Potter.
- throwaddzuzxd 5y agoThe Silmarillion
- watwut 5y agoAfaik, most of the texts we found are not considered religious by archeologists.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoApple marketing material - its worth watching Iron Sky: The Coming Race the sequel to Iron Sky, Just for the Religion based around apple.
- rsynnott 5y agoThere is a possible case of fiction being taken as a _historical_ text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Augusta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Augusta At one time this was taken quite seriously, and it's still an important historical source given how little is available on some of the time periods it covers, but it's unclear what it was _supposed to be_. It clearly wasn't intended as a historical text.
- p1mrx 5y agoI have no idea what historians would say about my tungsten cube, clump of silicon carbide, triangular prism, stainless steel fidget spinner, and hexastix made of pencils.
- iaw 5y agoTungsten cube was one of the best purchases I ever made.
- User23 5y agoMy cube is actually a high tungsten carbide. I do happen to have a 1kg elemental tungsten cylinder though. I like to imagine dropping it from space on things that would be greatly improved by becoming a crater. At some point I’d like to obtain matching gold and uranium cylinders.
- loonster 5y ago57k for 1kg of gold... You have very expensive taste in simple objects. Getting that 1kg made into an statue is only a rounding error.
- throwaway_kufu 5y agoI happened to be in a mayor’s jewelry store about 12 years ago when I saw someone walk in and purchase a gold paper clip for about $300 (want to say it was designer too, maybe Cartier). Never forget he looked raggedy as hell, he was wearing crocks, an inside out polo shirt with stains and some fishing shorts...when he took out his wallet it was held together by a rubber band, it was awesome.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWe can compare the view of expensive luxury stores in Pretty Woman (Julia Roberts attempts to walk into a top-end store and is summarily ejected by snotty staff) with the one in Breakfast at Tiffany's (staff are excruciatingly polite and bend over backwards to accommodate ridiculous requests from a guy who has already made it clear he doesn't have any money). People imagine the first mode, but the second one is much closer to reality.
- hutzlibu 5y agoThe difference here is, that we now live in an mostly atheistic society, while back then magic, sorcery and gods were standard.
- tremon 5y agoBut how do we know it belonged to a sorceress and not, say, a doctor, or an oracle?
- hutzlibu 5y agoI think there was not much difference ... And those real doctors who did exist (Hippocrates did lived before that time), probably used real tools.
- colechristensen 5y agoWhat’s the difference between a sorcerer and a doctor?
- krapp 5y agoWhat's the difference between religion and science? Superstition and knowledge? Bias and evidence?
- colechristensen 5y agoAnd before anybody had come up with all of these bits about how to use formalized experimentation and reason to arrive at truth? You had people doing things based on intuition and whatever means of gaining and transmitting knowledge that there was at the time... “sorcery” is more of a modern pejorative for practices which haven’t or couldn’t be verified with modern methods... before modern methods you had people doing what they could to accomplish things... it wouldn’t occur to you to distinguish (and you couldn’t) between “magic” nonsense and “real” medicine. You got treated with plants and concoctions that had at least some basis in reason and experience, but there weren’t yet philosophies about how to reliably separate what was real and what worked from what was bogus. Modern medicine still has plenty of nonsense in it which might as well be sorcery.
- pavlov 5y agoThere’s a fun 1970s book “Motel of the Mysteries” by the brilliant illustrator David Macaulay with this basic premise. A single motel room is discovered underground by future archeologists, who proceed to interpret everything as if entering Tutankhamen’s tomb. The dusty motel room and its “treasures” are illustrated with the same precision that Macaulay brought to his classic works like “City” and “Pyramid” (which this 80s child remembers fondly enough that I bought them used for my kids a few years back, along with “Motel”.)
- edoceo 5y agoMacaulay made "the way things work" too https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/304889.The_Way_Things_Work https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/304889.The_Way_Things_Wo... that book really inspired 12yr old me.
- aetherspawn 5y agoAs a child that was my favourite book. I am an electrical engineer now. I only just gifted my copy to a friend with a slightly autistic child.
- edoceo 5y agothis is The Way
- aetherspawn 5y agoAnd I must have spent 500 hours or more as a kid playing The Way Things Work: Pinball Science [1] on my 80Mhz Win 95 PC. [1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-way-things-work-pinball-science https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-way-things-work-pinbal...
- lethologica 5y agoHoly moly, that’s a blast from the past! I had borrowed this book from my schools library so many times my name was the only one on the borrowing card at the back!
- 5y ago
- riffraff 5y agoThere's (of course) a relevant xkcd comic for this idea https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/
- INTPenis 5y agoYeah I was thinking the same thing. I was a fan of MacGyver as a kid so I'd collect any trinket I could find. Instead of penises there would be cannabis leafs, political buttons and band parapharnelia. Clearly this was a powerful sorcerer. If found in a rich estate it might have been an unusual perk of wealthy children to collect these trinkets in their wooden boxes, just like children of the 90s did.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 5y ago“Ritual usage” seems to be attributed to anything that isn’t immediately obviously useful.
- colechristensen 5y agoIt is a bit of a problem with archeology which is also recognized by archaeologists. That and how the whole story of hundreds of years of civilization is sometimes just an embellished projection based on a handful of symbols scratched in stone somewhere.
- mysterydip 5y agoI read once that any object found that resembles things you may find at an adult store today gets labeled as "fertility ritual usage" to appear more academic
- dhimes 5y agoI'm sitting in Salem, MA, right now. It probably depends on where you live.
- seanhunter 5y ago"It seems this person had some kind of unusual attachment to different sorts of computer peripheral cables. In the remains of his house we found computer cables spanning at least 40 years worth of technology. Clearly he spent his life worrying about whether or not he might in future need to connect up peripherals that went to their grave decades before him."
- benlivengood 5y agoRealistically they'll probably fire up a copy of ILSVRC to recognize objects and a dated Wikipedia tarball to interpret their contemporary history. Either that or they'll shrug and melt them down in the hopes of finding trace metals for bronze/iron age weapons.