Comment by picafrost
5 days ago
Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will degrade much faster than even papyrus.
Assuming civilization as we know it today does not persist, how much of the knowledge and culture we've created will be recoverable in the future? We have more books than ever, but what about first-hand materials, journals, notes? I can't help but to feel that digital sieves like Google and the Internet Archive are our Library of Alexandria moments in waiting.
The vast majority of written works did not survive. Paper will rot, and inks fade - in the typical case you only get a couple hundred years (deserts like Egypt give you thousands - which is why archaeology is so interested in Egypt, there is a lot more remaining to study but we have no idea how Egypt reflects people elsewhere). Before the printing press, books had to be copied by hand each copy separately - this is a lot of labor. I'm told (I can't find prices online, just contact us...) that you can buy a hand copied of the Torah (first 5 books of the bible) for prices starting at $50,000, and if you want a known scribes' work the cost can go up to $200,000 - this is a bit of an outlier as the Torah is a sacred work and so they will start over if there is even one mistake (not cross out the mistake), but still that gives you the idea of why you would choose not to copy a book if it wasn't extremely important.
Many of the written works we have remain because Christian monks choose to copy it again and again - we mostly have no idea what works they choose not to copy (there is evidence they choose not to copy some works, but you have to be careful as there were multiple monasteries and one choose not to copy something doesn't mean a different didn't copy it thus it survives anyway). We also don't know which works don't survive because some per-christian civilization didn't copy it - folklore tries to blame Christians but many things didn't survive for them to make a choice. (in other parts of the world it wasn't Christians of course, but same considerations applied to them)
A hell of a lot more texts survived from ancient Mesopotamia thanks to them writing on clay tablets. If the town burnt down the tablets just get better preserved.
True, at the expense of being even harder to write than pen/ink.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is most of the tables survive because the town brunt - otherwise the clay was erased and we lost what was on it. It is really hard to write something book length on clay because of thickness, but for lists you will erase when done (think shopping lists - which is of great interest to archaeology because it is insights that wouldn't have been put in books) clay is easier than making more paper.
Ancient Greek is also important to our human past. So are the other hundreds of dead languages. Nobody would disagree that someone should know how to read them, but few argue that every single person should be fluent in them.
If all should fail, we'll just pick it back up, just like we have before with those things. Until then, they will remain dead to most.
There are literal billions of smartphones in circulation. You'd be hard pressed to find a way to destroy all digital technology without destroying all of humankind as a collateral.
yeah sadly both things can be true, the data we value for privacy is incredibly sticky, and the data with sentimental value to us is incredibly fragile.