And 5000 years isn’t particularly long in geologic time. I can imagine the fall and rise and fall and rise of civilization over the next 500,000 years. For perspective, “The time of divergence between archaic H. sapiens and ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans caused by a genetic bottleneck of the latter was dated at 744,000 years ago, combined with repeated early admixture events and Denisovans diverging from Neanderthals 300 generations after their split from H. sapiens, as calculated by Rogers et al. (2017).” So 500,000 years isn’t that long either: it’s not within human memory but at the time recognizably human species existed, though agriculture would only be invented around 10,000 BCE.
That certainly was a big issue, decades and decades ago. But it was about a couple of decades ago that people realized it was an issue, and from then on, it ceased to be an issue, because as soon as anyone got a new storage technology (which was always orders of magnitude larger than the previous technology), they copied everything over onto the new tech.
If people ever stop copying everything over, then it’ll definitely become an issue. And that might happen. But it won’t happen the same way it did in the past, with everyone just assuming they’d keep on using the old tape-readers until the last tape-reader broke down and got scrapped.
The only scenario where you could really trust long-term data preservation and maintenance would be if you had multiple, independent human populations, close enough to continue to exchange information, but still far-separated enough that the collapse of one wouldn’t lead to the collapse of others. There, you might see some of them preserving the information even as others collapsed, and then transferring it back to them once they’d rebuilt enough to accept it. There’d still be gaps, but they’d be like the gaps in fibers in a rope. We might get that with space colonization, but it’s hard to imagine populations on a single planet being isolated enough for that any more.
And there’s also “Archeology of scale” here. As famous as Roman Dodecahedrons are, when you look into them, there’s actually very few examples of them available. But smartphones? We’re building those in the billions. Even with recycling, it’s reasonable to suppose that millions will survive tucked away in drawers and cabinets. So future archeologists won’t have to treat every single one as a delicate and unique treasure, as we do with artefacts today. They’ll be much more open to just tearing them apart to see what makes them tick.
Sure. But geologic time wasn’t the scope asked about in the OP.
Sure. But the question isn’t whether people 5,000 years from now will be able to find evidence of our existence. The question is whether they will understand our way of live, technology, etc. Certainly we don’t need to go into the hundreds of thousands of years for our way of life to be forgotten. I don’t think we would need an eon for that to happen, and any number of major world wide events would due.
Of course, in Silo, that’s the result of a deliberate effort to erase their history. And even then, they didn’t completely succeed.
It’s also the result of people in the past - even the near past - being overwhelmingly more religious than the post-Enlightenment West. We sometimes gloss over this, I think.
Yes, it’s obviously a prayer wheel to the threesome deity. You speak your supplication while chewing chicle, then divide it and place into the receptacles. It spiritually repeats your words with every rotation until a piece is cast out.
I believe that unless there is a total global collapse of civilization - something that has never happened before - then the internet will continue to exist, and as we know, nothing on the internet is ever truly gone. 10,000 years from now, this very thread will still exist somewhere, embedded in the DNA of synthetic sea algae, or stored on the ring of singularities orbiting the planet, or on whatever the hell they’ll be using for data storage by then. The trick will be finding it.
Perhaps the technology will exist in 5000 years for Historians to journey 5000 light years from Earth and just watch our TV shows.
That will come as news to the people working in the field.
There’s still a large number of people who don’t see the value in old information. The stuff we’re working with currently, or that we have to consult regularly, gets saved, but old stuff? Why spend time and money copying data you don’t use?
Archivists and those in related professions, of course, understand the value of old information, but they’re not always consulted. Consider, for example, social media posts: major events such as the Arab Spring, BLM protests, and similar were organized and reported largely on social media, but a lot of the relevant posts have been deleted, permanently.
Then, too, there’s the MySpace music archive: something on the order of 50 million songs uploaded to that service before 2016 were permanently lost in a botched migration. (~450,000 have been recovered since, from somebody who’d done mass downloads back in the day.)
Data still gets lost because of things like botched backups, and it still gets lost because of people deliberately deleting it. But it doesn’t get lost any more from people just leaving it in the back of a closet until the reader gets scrapped. Like, when I get a new hard drive, the first thing I do is make a folder on it, and copy the entire contents of my old hard drive onto it. This is trivial to do, because the new drive is so much larger than the old, and it means that if I ever decide I need something from the old one, I can get it. I could go through and delete things I know I won’t need any more, but I don’t, because finding the things I don’t need would be more work than it’s worth. And I suspect that the same is true of, well, pretty much everyone who stores data.
I was going to bring that up – the people of We, or US, with their capital city of Pound-Laundry, and their enemies the More We, or USSR.
I wish I were as sanguine as you.
First off, the fact that there has never been a total global collapse of civilization doesn’t mean much when you consider the fact that it’s only been a few decades that we’ve had the capability to do so.
Just considering the threat of nuclear war, war planners in the 1950s reportedly estimated it would take “only” a few hundred nuclear weapons to assure complete destruction of the other side, which evolved into the strategy of so-called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). And then both sides proceeded to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world many times over. At least the situation was more-or-less stable with just two sides. But now throw into the mix China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, possibly Iran, etc. and the situation is anything but stable.
Indeed, we seem hell-bent on coming up with new and innovative ways to threaten not just our civilization but our very survival as a species, whether through nuclear Armageddon, climate change, artificial super-intelligence, a global pandemic, etc.
Sorry to be a downer, but I’m not very hopeful these days when I see the world leaders who are currently in charge of the various superpowers.
And for the OP to suggest that future archaeologists and historians can’t possibly know the details of current events presupposes that there won’t ever be anything that threatens our civilization, which I unfortunately don’t think is a great assumption.
That may work for individuals, but it doesn’t work in the institutional space. We’re not replacing one new hard drive every few years; we’re adding dozens or hundreds of new hard drives on a regular basis, and they’re almost never direct drop-in replacements. When you’re shuffling terabytes or petabytes of data around in a data center environment, somebody has to affirmatively find what is to be moved to which new fileserver or storage array, meaning stuff gets left behind as unneeded, unnecessary, or nobody still on staff knows why it might have been important or remembers to get it moved.
Consider carabiners. It’s entirely possible that future anthropologists would figure out from boxes or written texts how they were used in mountain climbing. But imagine them puzzling over a modern preserved city and the number of people who have one randomly clipped to their keys, or a belt loop or purse strap.
Even i couldn’t tell you why they do that. Or why there is a box of them near the register at every convenience store.
We just seem to like to have one at hand.
So the city was preserved, but not even one of the millions of glossy brochures and pamphlets for promo item companies etc?
And even you acknowledge many of them would be found with keys still clipped. So what’s left to puzzle out?
Sorry, that should be “…can’t possibly not know…”
Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of carabiners sold are completely unsuitable for mountain climbing, being made of lightweight aluminum. These carabiners are suitable for clipping lightweight objects only, not mountain climbing. Hence the warning included with all of those checkout-stand carabiners that say “NOT FOR CLIMBING.”
And yet we still enjoy stories about the Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt, Victorian England or pre-internet 1980s United States. I think people always are interested in stories about how people lived in other times and places.
Outside the context of popular entertainment, interest in History and prehistory is mostly in the service of religion and nationalism. If we are asking ourselves if people 5000 years from now will be interested in the same things we are, it’s helpful to consider what was of interest to people 5000 years ago. So much of what we think is important to civilization is really what we think is important to our civilization.