Do you know how clay tablet and Dead Sea scroll reconstruction is mostly done? Most of those are fragmentary too. Putting together broken bits of artefacts is a large part of what archaeologists do.
Contrary to popular opinion, archeologists have never really cared that much about finding old proclamations, news reports and history books. They’ve always known that those are unreliable. You know what archeologists love finding? Invoices and inventories, shipping orders and payrolls, receipts and business correspondence. Stuff like that is how they learn what the world is actually like, not the things people lie about. Fortunately, the vast majority of information in the world today is the boring business crap that future archeologists will get all horny for.
Humanity has never had any practical use for History or Archeology, and yet, we still dabble in them.
Or, looking at it the other way, we’ve always had use for history, and as long as we continue to be human, will always continue to do so.
As a historian, my dream is a future society where only hobbyists and cranks care about history because communities are looking to the present and future with hope and energy instead of dreaming of past glories or trying to figure out “how the @#$& did we get into this mess?”
…or using history to enforce conformity of thought and obedience.
I think you are confusing History with tradition. Most people only care about the former when it reinforces the latter. The idea that a civilization (or extraterrestrial visitors to Earth) thousands of years in the future will be interested in how we lived is a pretty wishful and, frankly, arrogant assumption.
The point of history is to learn from it how best to conduct our lives in the here and now. We can see what worked for past people, and repeat their good ideas, and what didn’t work, and avoid their mistakes.
Granted, this usually doesn’t work. But that’s because people ignore history, not because history is useless. All of the repeated mistakes of the past are the strongest evidence for why history is important.
I’m a historian (at least that’s what my degree says) and I’m fairly confident nobody in power has ever seriously consulted one (or an archeologist) about what happened thousands of years ago before making public policy. That old saw from George Santayana is all we got to make our discipline seem grander than the dabbling mentioned upthread. Unfortunately, knowing History is no barrier to repeating it or doing something much worse.
The archaeologist and historians are generally the last people to get ahold of valuable artifacts. The vast majority of our precious information will be delegated to scrap dealers and thieves. I can see old motherboards being used as art for people’s walls.
Many of the memory devices will be repurposed or thrown away and ruined in the trash. Server farms will be looted for cables and gold in the circuit boards.
“Nobody ever” is clearly too strong a statement, given that some people in power have themselves been historians (Woodrow Wilson, off the top of my head). But more to the point, everyone has “consulted with historians”, at least indirectly, to the extent that everyone takes history classes. And the good leaders are, by and large, the ones who paid attention. They don’t need to call a meeting with an academic to ask whether something is a good idea or not, because they paid attention and already know.
You have given me more motivation to do well at my boring-business-crap job as I sit at my desk… some future archeologist will get horny for the spreadsheet and Salesforce data that Velocity is crunching…
Sorry, i couldnt hold myself. I read only the first few posts.
But isnt it obvious that they would notice the 1000s of satelites around the globe, or even Viking probe, etc…
Sorry if any of you mentioned it already, but, long read before i could comment.
Also the moon landers from the 70s?
Things underground perhaps?
The OP assumes that our descendants will still have access to modern technology, like computers and electricity.
I read a Washington Post article recently, which led me to a depressing book that reawakened my old fears about a nuclear holocaust. Especially in light of who controls the launch codes for the U.S. arsenal today.
As either the article (or maybe the book) points out, civilization could end tomorrow. Hell, civilization could end 30 minutes from now. 
On that note, one of the plot points in the post-apocalyptic Apple TV series Silo is that a Pez dispenser is an ancient relic of unknown purpose.
I don’t buy it personally.
For one thing, as storage gets cheaper we copy vast chunks of it on to new media. We’ll finish up with superset data sources and only a minute fraction of it needs to be stored as well as, say, a bug in amber.
Note that there is a big difference between the claim that all data will be preserved and that some of it will. I’m not advocating complacency about data lost to history.
Plus we’re really messy. When we’re talking about historical artifacts, there may only ever have been a handful, and scribes had to manually write individual books documenting them, that were easily lost. Now we make millions of tons of garbage, and while much of it will decompose, at least some of it will be in the optimal conditions for preservation.
After all, organic material decomposes…the existence of fossils is purely down to some remains by chance being in an environment that didn’t allow oxygen to penetrate or microorganisms to survive.
I think a lot of people like the poetry of modern civilization being lost to time almost immediately. But we’ve left one heck of a messy dining table. It’s going to take nature at least tens of millions of years to clean up our crap. Deep time, not like archeologists looking back on human history.
I disagre with the OP’s premise – there are plenty of things right now that I can’t fathom the point of. Really. I frequently am forced to do what I call “industrial archaeology” at work, tring to figure out what certain pieces of equipment are, since the people who designed and built and used them are long gone. Without context, it’s frequently impossible.
Regarding all that stuff stored on digital media – there was an interesting article decades and decades ago in the American Heritage magazine of Science and Technology bemoaning the fact that lots of data the US goverment had saved on mag netic tapes was unreadable, because nobody knew exactly how and in what format it had been encoded. Ad to that the fact that any sort of digital media has a finite lifetime (which appears to be getting shorter as the density of storage increases) and I do not have high hoes for future readability of our stored data.
Regarding “It’s a religious object” – this really is to often the resort of people who can’t figure things out. In Frederick Pohl’s novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon the alien artifacts called “prayer fans” turn out not to be religious items at all, but simply recorded books. In real life, the North American artifacts called “birdstones” have been explained by some as religious statues, but it seems to me far more likely that they are atlatl handles.
(Other stones variously called “birdstones” and “bannerstones” might be atlatl weights)
I seriously doubt if data on hard drives will be durable in any useful way. Drives are built primarily with the criteria of being cheap and fast rather than for being long lasting. That’s true for even the drives in data centers. Certainly people want drives to last, but mostly with a time frame of 5-10 years. Drives that sit around for decades, centuries, or millennia will become corroded and suffer extensive bit loss. Even if the platters are pulled from the drive, the bits on the platters themselves will have degraded. This happens with drives in production today. It’s called bit rot. There are techniques to limit the data loss with techniques like checksums, data replication, and bit striping, but they depend on just a small amount of the bits being lost. After 100’s or 1000’s of years there will be so much bit rot that there will be little of the original data left behind. There won’t really be a way to tell which bits are good and which bits are bad. The drive will essentially look like random data.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the information in old, printed encyclopedia sets survive longer than a site like Wikipedia. Even if people download the site themselves, those copies will only be usable for a relatively short time. Volumes of books buried for 1000’s of years will likely yield their information very easily compared to a corroded metal platter with a bunch of scrambled bits.
I think Silo is a combination of features, because it combines smallish population size, lack of information transfer outside narrowly specified roles, and [spoiler] quite deliberate suppression of information from the powers controlling the Silos both locally and remotely. Which leads to another common complaint listed upthread, in that the PTB can easily suppress such information being released widely and/or stored. Oh, rarely completely but combined the expectation that much information will be lost in the hypothetical collapse, a major contributor to mis-information spread. Heck, a lot of what we know/think we know about Greek and Roman persons of note was hagiography or flat out rumor/scandalmonger by their detractors.
Except, of course, for the Wikipedia on the Moon. Maybe.
Hmm! Wikipedia on the Moon.
Y’know I jus’ 'bout had my fill.
Of Wikipedia on the Moon.
I think I’ll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special.
To Wikipedia on the Moon.
I’m reminded on the novel The Seren Cenacles. The protagonist has a historical curiosity handed down in his family from ancient (our) times, an odd spiky rod he knows was called a “swizzle stick” he just calls The Stick. Thing is, nobody knows anymore what a swizzle stick was for, so it’s just an oddity.
There’s a funny scene where he brandishes it like a weapon and holds several people “at gunpoint”, and it works because they have no more idea than he does what the weird spiky rod is for.