There are plenty of times when modern archeologists look at ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt and think “What’s this object” or “What exactly happened in 3000 BC?” but I think we are now, or long-past, the point where everything is so clear and well-known that future historians can’t not know what happened. I can’t imagine future archeologists looking at an iPod or Asus laptop and thinking “well, what was THIS used for?” or not knowing significant detail about the Vietnam War, Covid pandemic, etc.
The counter argument is all our records and artifacts are vastly more complicated and made of vastly less sturdy stuff. Unless major efforts are taken to preserve e.g. data from the 1940s it simply disappears forever as the machines needed to play it back all die of old age. And as the knowledge of how the data was encoded dies too.
The 21st century may leave far fewer understandable artifacts and records to the 31st century than the 11th did to the 21st. Despite a vastly larger population and vastly more goods and records per capita.
When our information databases are no longer readable and the books have turned to dust there will be many misunderstandings. What if future people regress and are not even as advanced as we are now ?
Like what on earth is this for?
I highly doubt it. There is no real reason to think that our technology, writing, or history will survive in a coherent form for 5,000 years, especially given the uncertainties of how society will change due to climate change.
It’s a religious object
Sometimes I wonder if we ever got this far in the past, there’s just no evidence of it because it all broke down and degraded.
Maybe not this far, but further along than we generally think when we think about prehistory.
Without the Internet to explain everything I think future archeologists would be pretty baffled.
The OP might usefully read this and a couple of the cited works.
The Long Now foundation thinks about long-term information storage a lot. One of their projects is the Rosetta Disk:
Basically a nickel disk etched with 13,000 pages of information.
There’s a large problem that I don’t think has been fully thought through, but that I also think has a solution: what to do about computational resources? Much of our data is in a form (MP3, JPG, PDF, etc.) that requires a program to interpret. But how do you transmit the program to some future computer?
You can document the hardware and all that, but obligating that future civilization to reimplement an entire computer to read these things is problematic.
What you want is a kind of bootstrapping, where those future cyber-archaeologists only have to implement an exceptionally simple computer to start with. A Turing machine might work, but it’s not a great architecture. There are some better choices that are still very simple, like Lisp or FORTH machines, though. They can be implemented in just a few hundred instructions on essentially any machine.
That bootstrap kernel allows executing more and more complicated environments, each one adding more features and building on the last, eventually reaching arbitrary complexity (say, a modern Linux machine). And it’s that computer that can interpret all our current data.
Of course, if those future people don’t have computers at all, then it’s hopeless. But it would be hopeless to expect them to go through our many exabytes of information anyway without computer augmentation.
The OP might also be interested in Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay.
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985.
The toilet seat sacred collar always made me laugh.
Hard disagree. Very little electronic data is just stored in one place, in one format. Quite a lot of it is quite distributed. In 2017, research indicated that 90% of the world’s data was created in the previous two years, and that must only have grown since. That’s not going to be data only stored on obsolete media.
In addition to the rapid obsolescence of our digital media (who still has a CD drive? Somewhere to put those flash memory cards at the bottom of your desk drawer?), it’s also my perception that a lot of our media requires interpretation through tons of cultural context distributed throughout our information media. What could skibidi toilet possibly mean to somebody not immersed in the sociocultural context that gave rise to it? Even if everything were still accessible to future generations, we might well be talking lions to them.
It’s a sex thing.
Maybe some dig will fortuitously turn up some high quality internet shards.
Consider that people frequently post pictures of objects from various times in the preceding century and ask “What is this thing?” – and often there are multiple guesses, and sometimes nobody knows the answer.
Hah! The universal answer!
– from our particular civilization, anyway.
Not obsolete yet you mean.
I understand this is at least adjacent to your experitise, and certainly nowhere near mine.
But plenty of experts have worried about the fact that none of our digital storage devices, none of our digital file systems, none of our OSes, none of our hardware, and none of our software lasts very long before being replaced by something different and incompatible with the old stuff.
Unless lots of resources are expended to continuously copy old data to new places, and to keep it logically accessible, not just a mysterious stream of bits, it’ll “rot” very quickly. Faster in fact than plain text documents printed on archival paper with archival ink.
The dodecahedrons of the future.
Has the ability of flash drives to retain information improved? Twenty years ago the business manager wanted to backup all our data on flash drives. I pointed out to her that out of a hundred flash drives, some might not retain data after ten or twenty years.
It isn’t going to be hard to figure out the purpose of flash drives. Or optical disks or hard drives or any other storage device. What will be difficult is actually extracting the information from said devices. If the information even exists at that point.
It’s both! But wait, there’s more . . .
Here’s a (condensed) transcription of that 46-year-old book.
A review of the book:
Archaeologists in the year 4022 discover what they interpret to be an elaborate burial site for royalty. The reader is in on the joke of course–the “ancient burial site” is clearly a 20th century motel: the Motel “Toot n C’mon” (Go ahead, read that aloud). I am certain this book gave me my perverse love of puns. The ceremonial headdress in the image above is a toilet seat, complete with the “sanitized for your protection” strip written in an indecipherable ancient language spoken in the land of “Usa” that the future archaeologists have apparently yet to decode.
In the digital age, all data can and will be preserved indefinitely, because it’s easier to keep it all than it is to try to decide what to delete… as long as infrastructure keeps being maintained. And maybe infrastructure will continue to be maintained into the far future. But if something happens that causes a major shock to our civilization, most of it could still be lost.
It must be associated with a fertility ritual, then.