Comment by krapp
3 years ago
I'm certain that 100 years from now, when the collapse really gets rolling, we'll still have cuneiform clay tablets complaining about Ea-Nassir's shitty copper but most of the digital information and culture we've created and tried to archive will be lost forever. Eventually, we're going to lose the infrastructure and knowledge base we need to keep updating everything, people will be too busy just trying to find food and fighting off mutants from the badlands to care.
Well, almost all early tablets are destroyed or otherwise lost now. Do you think we will lose virtually all digital age information within a century? Maybe from a massive CME, I suppose.
Clay tablets were usually used for temporary records, as you could erase it simply by smearing the clay a little bit (a lot easier than writing with on papyrus). The tablets we have exist because of something that causes the clay to be baked into ceramic, which is generally some sort of catastrophic fire that caused the records to accidentally be preserved for much longer.
I know. My first iPad just stopped powering up. WTF!
I should etch something into its glass and bury it in my back yard. Perhaps a shopping list, or a complaint about how my neighbor inexplicably gets into his truck six or eight times a day and just sits there with it running.
I can see it happening. Not as a single catastrophic event but, like Rome falling bit by bit, our technological civilization fails and degenerates as climate change (in the worst possible scenario) wreaks havoc on everything.