I was reading about some Doge of Genoa that I picked at random from a list and I thought that as much or as little as we know about ourselves today, how much do you think will survive to the future?
Think about your minor representatives, state governors, backbench MPs. Considered of importance today and we can all talk about Marjorie Taylor-Greene or Gavin Newsom, and these are “hot-button” personalities. But what about 500 years from now?
Will we have the documentation to go back and look at history with the proper context, or is a lot of this going to fall by the wayside?
Just a thought as I was drinking my coffee!
Almost every book on "current issues" is unsellable after a couple of years. Most of those things are
noise. Distractions.
With the dematerialization of all these discussions, less will survive into the remote future by way of lost books gatherind dust in some archive. And nothing of importance will have been lost?
I know the name of one magistrate of the local roman city colapsed into ruin. Only one name survived, carved in a funerary stone. Who cares about it? His personal and politcal dramas, lost to history, are as much dust as he became (buried in acidic soil...). Perhaps they would be as interesting as any fictional historical novel set in the time. But people through these 2000 years had a reason to care to present it. And I bet the history of his life was lost right in the next generation.
I didn’t think too much about data storage being a problem, assuming that over time we just copy and copy the stuff over to newer media as we do. It would be interesting to see how legacy systems emerge as time goes on if file formats are changing.
I was thinking almost the opposite problem: that we will have so much junk information out there it will be too much to parse.
No, the storage and updating of it is a big, big problem. A big cost, and a huge requirement on technical capability. I do not hold a teleological view of history, and doubt it can be maintained.
I remember an episode of Highlander, in which Methos and Duncan are browsing through an antique shop. Methos picks up a ceramic whatsit, and says something to the effect of how things considered rare and valuable now were once the equivalent of mass-produced stuff that everyone had, so they were really cheap and not valuable at all (Methos is the oldest Immortal, who's lived around 5000 years).
I sincerely hope that the future doesn't think it's the mass-produced crap that becomes rare and valuable.
The
valuable old stuff was invariably done by very skilled artisans. It was
not a "mass market product". Or it was mass market in the sense that every important person could eventually own one or two items of the type, but only some very few elite persons had exquisite pieces. In the antiques business you find huge differences in regard for an exquisite old painting or carving, and for a crude one. Most egyptian tombs had beetles and other stauettes, there are millions of the stuff.
But most are crude, the valuable ones are carved in semi-precious stones or with great skill. Old chinese porcelain can be fooud easily and cheap, it was exported in the hundreds of millions back in the day and probably millions of pieces remain intact. Only really well made and decorated (or very large) pieces of specific periods (plus all archaic) are rare and expensive. And I have doubts about the ""rare". Same for thousands of years old metal objects: a celtic bronze fibula is easy to actually find in the field, a gold one intrincately decorated is a treasure for the wealthiest museums, rarely seen for sale.
The rare, if it is not beautiful or otherwise appealing, is almost always worthless in the antiques trade. I have surviving pieces apparently (location) from a pre-historic city whose inhabitants probably traded all the way from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and settled Britain. Not many large settlements found from the era, it started a new pottery type for the archeologic record. But the name of the city and its narrative history is lost. No one has interest in its remains, the excavated ruins have been abandoned to the elements and some eventual builder in need of stone to crush.
And older stuff is even more disregarded. Material remains can last a
long time,
if the materials are durable. The civilizations that came before these late pre-historic and historic ones using metal and stone surely also produced lots of stuff and almost all now is lost, it was perishable, organic materials. Stone tools remain, stretching back tens of thousands of years, and those one stumbles upon easily and you can't even
give them away to a local museum unless they are
appealing to exhibit.
The materials of the digital age
are and
are not perishable. We are much like that pre-historic age in this duality for the archeologic record. A thousand years from now the world will be littered with remains of smartphones and if there is an antiques trade the remains will be cheap, like mass produced coins or fibulas of old are now cheap. But no one will be reading the bits and bytes they once held, lost to entropy, like the organic materials of old are lost to us. If a pristine smartphose somehow is found well-preserved, the plastics not decomposed and the metals not corroded, it will be expensive! Perhaps held in private collections throughout the collapse and rebuild of human civilizations, like some roman era works held in church treasuries. But even from such a piece I bet no one will be reading useable bits.
For the sake of preervation, we cannot even have insight into the next 50 years.
A Canticle for Leobowitz is already outdated as a sci-fi speculation, our civilization is getting rid of the easy-to-copy and maintain knowlege, hand-written documents. Who then will be able to maintain, even access for copy, the knowlege of present humanity if electricity fails?
Writing itself is a disappearing skill? Then perhaps the book is prophetic, we're not just arrived at the nuclear holocaust stage. But monks preserving only some scraps of knowlege because everyone ele died or lost the skill to do it a speculative scenario one cannot entirely dismiss, the way things are.
We learn more about our past every week. There are more papers with a more concrete manner of drilling down on historical events and trends than ever before... I think this whole thread smells of nihilism and "old-man" think
Ironically, we also lose scholarly knowlege. I have seen records of colonial-era exploration of Africa destroyed because "they took too much room". Room had to be made for
students with laptops. For the sake of being a
modern libray. Some were digitalized (and who will curate them?), some were not, assuming there would be a copy in the national library. As they were reports from meetings I doubt that very much.
I have little faith that the huge output of research on history will be maintained.
Can be maintained. The profession is at its lowest "social valuation" in decades. I could point out a number of fields that have been entirely abandoned as other fads took over. But I do not want to get into details. Just count me an old man I guess.
