Depends. In some ways you are correct but in other ways not so much. We like to think in the digital age once its up, its up forever. In theory yes but in some ways no since we have already seen in recent memory. Hell the popularity of lemmy and the fedeverse was kicked off because many of us left reddit, lead to many of us basically deleting/editing our prior comments. Someone can possibly have a snapshot of it but the chances of it are pretty small for some weird random obscure post on a forum. Our reliance on free services can easily lead to something disappearing as easily as it appeared. Hell we are seeing some youtube videos basically disappearing over fears of Ai scraping and it can happen abruptly.
Funny how some older media are so much better for longevity, like CDs.
And the expected lifespan is still only 50-100 years.
That’s a speck of sand it the human history.
Tape disk drives and tapes are actually some of the longest lasting, when stored properly. Tape isn’t great for active data needs, where you need to read/write the data regularly. Super slow for that. But it’s killer for writing once and then dropping it in storage.
Anyway, same thing with tapes, the length of time they last is a fraction of history, on top of needing proprietary hardware to play them.
For example, there was that recently unearthed pilot of a sketch comedy show from Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’s Douglas Adams. It’s not particularly great, but it was lost to time except for a copy that Chapman had recorded to tape when the show first aired.
Problem was, that tape was so old when it was discovered, it pre-dated VHS and Betamax and was in a format that literally no players existed for anymore. This lead to a long effort to rebuild a player from scratch, which they eventually succeeded, and now it lives on YouTube for weird comedy nerd historians.
Anyway, the point being is that the mediums are short-term storage, for all intents and purposes, and that pretty much goes for all types of media humans uses, going as far back as stone tablets and books. The ones that survived were lucky and most are lost to time due to destruction or environmental degradation. At least with stone tablets and paper all you needed was to understand the language it was written in. Now we’re going to need electricity and knowledge of historical data storage practices and technologies.
So, we’re always losing history, and people who go out of their way to preserve history and put it in modern formats to attempt to keep the data from disappearing forever are doing a service to future human history. I would say, in this way, pirates who remove DRM from media are taking part in an act of historical preservation.
Yeah, I think as long as we can count on some level of society, we have a shot at longer term preservation. Like, computers will continue to get faster, and mediums will continue to get upgraded and transferred and so forth, and we’re kind of already at a point where nothing recorded today needs to be “lost” with some careful planning. There are obvious holes in this, but it’s increasingly less likely to be a problem that the storage medium is the issue (again, caveating that we’re not talking about rebuilding society after a catastrophe or something) and more a problem with what the dependency of reading the data to be saved is, whether it’s transferred on storage formats that maintain data integrity, etc.
Like, we can do redundant backups and so forth, but what if the things we’re backing up are server dependent? Or even simpler shit like Flash games. I really hope that more people writing software especially think about how to keep it usable for a long time.
I’m not really sure what quantum archeology is, but another possibility is that, should we ever discover a way of circumventing the speed of light, you could fly millions of light-years away and set up a big-ass telescope to watch past earth. It’d only work if we discover a way of travelling ftl though, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll accomplish that in our lifetimes.
There are so many crazy possibilities that will probably never happen, I love imagining what the world would be like if we could look through a time window - my daydream is normally about sending probes back to the point in space earth used to be and how fascinating the debates about where to look first would be, knowing it’s going to take years to get there and record it with everyone debating and getting anxious as to what it’ll see.
Like imagine how much information you’d get from fifteen minutes 4k footage of a Roman senate debate, and how disappointing it’d be after all that anticipation if you get a day or was closed. Still a billion things to obsess over in the image but disappointing when you’re hoping to see ceaser speak
Of course trying to catch sight of Jesus would be a huge project, I imagine it like those grifts where people go looking for the arc. What do they do if there’s no sign? What do they do if when they look nothing is anything like expected - would be so many people trying to find clues to what actually happened, at some point someone is going to find something really wild like they finally find someone from the Bible but it’s Jesus mate Judas laughing about how rich they’re getting pulling the reward money and rescue scam from the good the bad and the ugly…
And the people scouring to get clips for their YouTube channel, histories biggest cringe moments, wildest parties in history, luckiest trick shots ever…
What I would find absolutely crazy is someone having no idea how this technology that we find ubiquitous, but the far future doesn’t have a clue about it, so someone gets out his Quantum Resurrection machine and brings back Millenial Grandpa to explain how the cartridge needs to be blown into
There’s lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.
History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That’s where the historical blind spots are.
And you are ultimately going to die as part of that 90% that won’t be remembered for anything at all no matter how big of a deal you view yourself in any form function or manner.
Me too. It won’t be so bad. Unless they check the hard drive. Oh buddy then we’re historically remembered. Like, that’s a lotta porn.
The thought of having your digital foot print live on forever was kind of neat, but most of it wasn’t worth remembering or will probably get deleted after a few decades anyways. Future generations will ever know about the witty banter on yahoo answers.
yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.
I would say considering homo sapiens have been around for ~250,000 years we need a lot of decimal places… if you want to consider prior homo species that’s 2.8 million years and honestly you might as well call it 100%.
I used to say the same thing to my highschool history teacher. Little did I know, it would help me later on. I’m not talking about pointless dates - it’s the lessons that matter.
One can’t know everything, but knowing some of it enables us to prevent the mistakes that we would have made otherwise.
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