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Ancient cultures really put things into perspective. Tablets from thousands of years ago: they still persist. Will our culture, 5000 years from now?
by fedeb95 4y ago
Ancient cultures really put things into perspective. Tablets from thousands of years ago: they still persist. Will our culture, 5000 years from now?
- JW_00000 4y agoSurely, out of the billions of books that exist in the world right now, some will survive 5000 years. The Library of Congress is archiving many (but no longer all) tweets [1] and web pages. The British Library is similarly archiving tweets, podcasts, etc. The Internet Archive idem ditto, and many national libraries throughout the world are doing the same. If even a tiny fraction of that survives the next 10,000 years, there'll be much more remaining of the 21st century than of the 35th century BC. [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
- tsol 4y agoBut the data on hard drives last a finite amount of time. And so do paper books. Time wears away at both.
- throwaway932489 4y agoGood thing we create things like "forever chemicals", nuclear waste, single-use plastics then I guess ;)
- fedeb95 4y agoOk, but we don't know which kind of catastrophic event will wipe us out this time. So we can't know in advance which kind of media will survive best. Replication across many mediums seems the best approach, but it doesn't give us certainty.
- asdff 4y agoThe plastic stuff will definitely be around still. Future archaeologists will call us "The great plastic bottle culture"