8 ms·

I think that if humanity survives another 2000 years, our descendants will know far less about us than we do about our ancestors.

wcoenen 3y ago
The Long Now foundation is trying to fix that, e.g. with their Rosetta project. They actually managed to get a copy onto comet "67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://longnow.org/ideas/after-more-than-a-decade-esas-rosetta-mission-arrives-at-comet-67p/ https://longnow.org/ideas/after-more-than-a-decade-esas-rose...
qup 3y ago
For what reason?
- pjmlp 3y ago
  A few things come to mind, the longevity of digital based information, how electronics doesn't survive as well as clay and paper, encrypted storage, commercial software stored information, and how well we may nuke ourselves.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Digital data that we don’t have a very long history of maintaining and largely not maintained and most paper print matter is very short lived relative to what we have gleaned from metal, stone and clay used by prior civilizations.
- scarecrowbob 3y ago
  I think this is an interesting question in that it brings up two points. The media this culture creates (specifically writing, in general) is very specific but very fragile. So eventually it wears out, and every year our storage media get vastly more fragile- photos from the early 1900s might last longer than stuff on hard drives if humans forget how to build those kinds of things. But (and this is what I find interesting) the oral traditions that go back (in what we call north America) go back 15k years or more don't "count" under the current epistemic regime. Generally this history isn't something most of the people I run into are aware of, and when people are aware of them they come across as fables/ folk tales/ lore and not material history. I live around a lot of native folks whose history has been often lost as they have been the victims of a vast genocide seeking to eradicate their culture. However, if you look online you can find discussions about oral histories around hunting mammoths, for instance. This has become a relevant discussion as the amount of genocide has eased up a bit and we have, for instance, native folks doing academic anthropology who can tie an archeological history of (say) large mammoth kills to specific oral narratives. So, I get what seems to be the original point (our writing will become less legible), but I also find some irony in the idea that people with oral traditions might know a lot more about their long-term ancestors than our rather ephemeral culture.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Oral traditions can certainly have stories that line up with ancient events. But if you've got 100 stories and 3 line up with ancient events, could that just be coincidence? In any case, how much information can be stored in a person's head? It can't be that much.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
kouru225 3y ago
I don’t understand why people say this. Digital formats can be easily ported over to other digital formats and the more we can automate, the easier it’ll be to port digital information from one format to another. I don’t think we’ll lose very much data at all.
- kaashif 3y ago
  Unless civilization is destroyed after a nuclear war, solar event, something else. Knowledge could be lost in a handful of generations. Maybe a global pandemic makes everyone have constant debilitating brain fog and everything just stops working. I think the right actor in the right place could make these things (except the solar thing) happen. Although a good point to consider is that we have lost the vast majority of information about the past, so it's not like the old way of writing stone tablets or whatever is necessarily good.
- wcoenen 3y ago
  Preserving digital data requires constant maintenance, because none of the media we use will last forever. Any maintenance gap of a few decades means the data is lost. Such gaps are inevitable over longer timescales like thousands of years.
  - xvector 3y ago
    Computers from the 70s still work fine today, and technology is more resilient, not less. All of Wikipedia (and relevant human histories and discoveries) can fit on a small USB drive.
    - asdff 3y ago
      Just because something lasts 50 years doesn't say anything about 2000
  - kouru225 3y ago
    Preserving analog data also requires maintenance, except digital maintenance is much easier to do and can be, at least partially, automated, while analog maintenance is specialty work that can’t be automated at all.
forinti 3y ago
We produce huge amounts of artifacts in plastic, metal, ceramics, etc, that will last a very long time. Archeologists will have tons of garbage to go through, lots of it with dates and place of origin molded into them.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Future archeologists are going to know lots about our consumption from all the food and drink containers. Some written items, like street signs, are going to last a long time.
scarecrowbob 3y ago
Well, considering that we have human ancestors going back hundreds of millenia, I feel like we actually know very little about them. Often I get the feeling that the culture I live in makes so many assumptions about other people that we misunderstand even folks who are living now, so people I think we have a very hard time understanding the folks who were living 50k years ago who were every bit as smart, kind, and funny as we are now.
ianburrell 3y ago
If you are a reader, you probably have more books than the entire corpus of ancient Greek writing. We still make lots of paper books. Some will be buried in places they survive. If civilization doesn't completely collapse, somebody will collect books. If we really cared about preservation, we could archive things better. Like printing books on something that won't degrade. Or inventing archival data storage. I can see focus on preservation happening if there is a near collapse of civilization.
- em-bee 3y ago
  preserving books is not cheap. most private collections will end up destroyed, because their value is unknown and the cost to even evaluate what is worth preserving exceeds the value of the books themselves. just the other day i heard the story of a private collector leaving 75,000 books behind, that the heirs can't even afford to dispose of, let alone preserve. there is no complete catalogue, if there is one at all, and most certainly not a digital catalogue. they will most likely end up being permanently destroyed in paper recycling, if they keep the house. otherwise it will be cheaper to just tear the house down with the books still inside. so in the end the only books being preserved will be libraries as long as those are being funded. for less popular titles that means just a few copies of each book. and those that can be digitized before they are being destroyed. beyond that what will survive are at best maybe a few private libraries that are on privately owned properties owned by a family that cares. with that in mind it would actually be an interesting question how to bury books with minimal effort so that they have at least some chance to survive
- permo-w 3y ago
  >If you are a reader, you probably have more books than the entire corpus of ancient Greek writing. I'm sorry but this is just not true
  - theoldlove 3y ago
    TLG has ~20 million words of Greek before 300 CE. [1] A novel is about ~100k words. So total ancient Greek is ~200 books. Do you own more than 200 books? Lots of people do. [1]. http://vitruviandesign.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-thousand-years-of-greek.html http://vitruviandesign.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-thousand-y...
Wytwwww 3y ago
Outside of archeology we basically know nothing about pre-Roman Britain. We hardly know anything about Roman Britain too and we barely know what happened after the Romans left. Barring some world ending apocalypse I find it hard to imagine that, even if let's say 1000 times less written material survived the next 2000 years compared to the 2000 that preceded us our descendants would still have several magnitudes more information about our times than we do about 0 BC (especially if we're talking about Britain or pretty much any people in Europe who did not speak Latin or Greek).
- HappyDaoDude 3y ago
  It is hard to tell what we will leave. Depending on how our civilization declines, if it just the typical path of resource overshoot and decline I do wonder how much of what we are creating today will last. Digital technology is efficient but lacks resilience. Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years. The things that make it through these periods are the stuff that is seen as useful to the folks in between. This is why we get a lot of religion, the odd bits of sciences stuff, a lot on growing food and snips of history if lucky. Heck for the might of the Roman empire, we only have 25 seconds of sheet music remaining. It is also funny how little we know about some of the Emperors. Things like, they had children, we do not know their names or if they survived childhood. The gaps are huge. The things that survive are the things other think are worth surviving. Hygiene practices yes! Tiktok... no.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years. I've heard this a lot and don't find it credible. I have many books that are from 1 to 150 years old and none have shown signs of turning into sawdust. I even have 40 year old computer mags that are like new.
  - permo-w 3y ago
    at the bare minimum, we have graveyards all over the place with our language, names, number system, religious symbology, etc etc carved into stone

wcoenen 3y ago

The Long Now foundation is trying to fix that, e.g. with their Rosetta project. They actually managed to get a copy onto comet "67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project https://longnow.org/ideas/after-more-than-a-decade-esas-rosetta-mission-arrives-at-comet-67p/ https://longnow.org/ideas/after-more-than-a-decade-esas-rose...

qup 3y ago

For what reason?

pjmlp 3y ago
A few things come to mind, the longevity of digital based information, how electronics doesn't survive as well as clay and paper, encrypted storage, commercial software stored information, and how well we may nuke ourselves.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Digital data that we don’t have a very long history of maintaining and largely not maintained and most paper print matter is very short lived relative to what we have gleaned from metal, stone and clay used by prior civilizations.
scarecrowbob 3y ago
I think this is an interesting question in that it brings up two points. The media this culture creates (specifically writing, in general) is very specific but very fragile. So eventually it wears out, and every year our storage media get vastly more fragile- photos from the early 1900s might last longer than stuff on hard drives if humans forget how to build those kinds of things. But (and this is what I find interesting) the oral traditions that go back (in what we call north America) go back 15k years or more don't "count" under the current epistemic regime. Generally this history isn't something most of the people I run into are aware of, and when people are aware of them they come across as fables/ folk tales/ lore and not material history. I live around a lot of native folks whose history has been often lost as they have been the victims of a vast genocide seeking to eradicate their culture. However, if you look online you can find discussions about oral histories around hunting mammoths, for instance. This has become a relevant discussion as the amount of genocide has eased up a bit and we have, for instance, native folks doing academic anthropology who can tie an archeological history of (say) large mammoth kills to specific oral narratives. So, I get what seems to be the original point (our writing will become less legible), but I also find some irony in the idea that people with oral traditions might know a lot more about their long-term ancestors than our rather ephemeral culture.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Oral traditions can certainly have stories that line up with ancient events. But if you've got 100 stories and 3 line up with ancient events, could that just be coincidence? In any case, how much information can be stored in a person's head? It can't be that much.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

kouru225 3y ago

I don’t understand why people say this. Digital formats can be easily ported over to other digital formats and the more we can automate, the easier it’ll be to port digital information from one format to another. I don’t think we’ll lose very much data at all.

kaashif 3y ago
Unless civilization is destroyed after a nuclear war, solar event, something else. Knowledge could be lost in a handful of generations. Maybe a global pandemic makes everyone have constant debilitating brain fog and everything just stops working. I think the right actor in the right place could make these things (except the solar thing) happen. Although a good point to consider is that we have lost the vast majority of information about the past, so it's not like the old way of writing stone tablets or whatever is necessarily good.
wcoenen 3y ago
Preserving digital data requires constant maintenance, because none of the media we use will last forever. Any maintenance gap of a few decades means the data is lost. Such gaps are inevitable over longer timescales like thousands of years.
- xvector 3y ago
  Computers from the 70s still work fine today, and technology is more resilient, not less. All of Wikipedia (and relevant human histories and discoveries) can fit on a small USB drive.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Just because something lasts 50 years doesn't say anything about 2000
- kouru225 3y ago
  Preserving analog data also requires maintenance, except digital maintenance is much easier to do and can be, at least partially, automated, while analog maintenance is specialty work that can’t be automated at all.

forinti 3y ago

We produce huge amounts of artifacts in plastic, metal, ceramics, etc, that will last a very long time. Archeologists will have tons of garbage to go through, lots of it with dates and place of origin molded into them.

ianburrell 3y ago
Future archeologists are going to know lots about our consumption from all the food and drink containers. Some written items, like street signs, are going to last a long time.

scarecrowbob 3y ago

Well, considering that we have human ancestors going back hundreds of millenia, I feel like we actually know very little about them. Often I get the feeling that the culture I live in makes so many assumptions about other people that we misunderstand even folks who are living now, so people I think we have a very hard time understanding the folks who were living 50k years ago who were every bit as smart, kind, and funny as we are now.

ianburrell 3y ago

If you are a reader, you probably have more books than the entire corpus of ancient Greek writing. We still make lots of paper books. Some will be buried in places they survive. If civilization doesn't completely collapse, somebody will collect books. If we really cared about preservation, we could archive things better. Like printing books on something that won't degrade. Or inventing archival data storage. I can see focus on preservation happening if there is a near collapse of civilization.

em-bee 3y ago
preserving books is not cheap. most private collections will end up destroyed, because their value is unknown and the cost to even evaluate what is worth preserving exceeds the value of the books themselves. just the other day i heard the story of a private collector leaving 75,000 books behind, that the heirs can't even afford to dispose of, let alone preserve. there is no complete catalogue, if there is one at all, and most certainly not a digital catalogue. they will most likely end up being permanently destroyed in paper recycling, if they keep the house. otherwise it will be cheaper to just tear the house down with the books still inside. so in the end the only books being preserved will be libraries as long as those are being funded. for less popular titles that means just a few copies of each book. and those that can be digitized before they are being destroyed. beyond that what will survive are at best maybe a few private libraries that are on privately owned properties owned by a family that cares. with that in mind it would actually be an interesting question how to bury books with minimal effort so that they have at least some chance to survive
permo-w 3y ago
>If you are a reader, you probably have more books than the entire corpus of ancient Greek writing. I'm sorry but this is just not true
- theoldlove 3y ago
  TLG has ~20 million words of Greek before 300 CE. [1] A novel is about ~100k words. So total ancient Greek is ~200 books. Do you own more than 200 books? Lots of people do. [1]. http://vitruviandesign.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-thousand-years-of-greek.html http://vitruviandesign.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-thousand-y...

Wytwwww 3y ago

Outside of archeology we basically know nothing about pre-Roman Britain. We hardly know anything about Roman Britain too and we barely know what happened after the Romans left. Barring some world ending apocalypse I find it hard to imagine that, even if let's say 1000 times less written material survived the next 2000 years compared to the 2000 that preceded us our descendants would still have several magnitudes more information about our times than we do about 0 BC (especially if we're talking about Britain or pretty much any people in Europe who did not speak Latin or Greek).

HappyDaoDude 3y ago
It is hard to tell what we will leave. Depending on how our civilization declines, if it just the typical path of resource overshoot and decline I do wonder how much of what we are creating today will last. Digital technology is efficient but lacks resilience. Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years. The things that make it through these periods are the stuff that is seen as useful to the folks in between. This is why we get a lot of religion, the odd bits of sciences stuff, a lot on growing food and snips of history if lucky. Heck for the might of the Roman empire, we only have 25 seconds of sheet music remaining. It is also funny how little we know about some of the Emperors. Things like, they had children, we do not know their names or if they survived childhood. The gaps are huge. The things that survive are the things other think are worth surviving. Hygiene practices yes! Tiktok... no.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years. I've heard this a lot and don't find it credible. I have many books that are from 1 to 150 years old and none have shown signs of turning into sawdust. I even have 40 year old computer mags that are like new.
- permo-w 3y ago
  at the bare minimum, we have graveyards all over the place with our language, names, number system, religious symbology, etc etc carved into stone