"Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against en

"Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy." Only the ones that have survived. For every book or tablet we have, there are certainly tens of THOUSANDS of which every copy ever published has been lost - most of those are ephemera that wouldn't mean much to us anyways, but the lost also include things that would be nice: the majority of Livy, any of the original source material for the Gospels, etc. Even considerably more modern material has been vanishing at a significant rate; for instance, most of the output of the silent film era has already been lost.