Historians Fear 21st Century Will Be 'Black Hole'

[HomeAliveIn45]

As mentioned, the difficulty would be in sorting through enourmous amounts useless info such as:

"So, I've noticed the water sprinklers at the White House come on twice a week now."
"Yeah, they used to be three times a week, not anymore..."

And pertinent info NOT related to gardening.

 

[KaZZaP]

Well maybe its a good thing this era will be forgotten, in 100 years they will look back at us now and be baffled.... if we still exist...

 

[Aardvark]

I had a plan to take snapshots of 4chan, print out the whole site, with all comments and images, then store it in a time capsule set to open in 100 years time, to remind the inhabitants of the strange future why they destroyed the internet and returned to a pastoral society.

 

[fluffylandmine]

I had a plan to take snapshots of 4chan, print out the whole site, with all comments and images, then store it in a time capsule set to open in 100 years time, to remind the inhabitants of the strange future why they destroyed the internet and returned to a pastoral society.

That or they will think that mental disease was rampant to a point where we were forced to herd some of them together in one place for entertainment purposes.

Or as I like to call it: the truth.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

It's true really, even out paper products, being bio degradable and all, likely won't last too long past our current culture.

 

[RyePunk]

I've got this history degree thing and all i can think of is "meh"
Somehow I dont expect life to ever be easy for the historian, if you arent struggling through Linear B, you're working with Punic Greek, and in one thousands years they'll be working with C++ and Binary wondering how the frick we were ever so primitive.
The main issue that is facing historians is that the rift between idealized societies and the real society will remain. Basically what gets left behind is what the society TRIES to leave behind so they look good, but isnt necessarilarily what life actually was like. So sure we know all about the rich citizens of Greece but we know absolutely nothing about their slaves. In the same manner we know far more about Noble lords and leaders than we do about some average peasant. THis changed considerably around the 1800s because people started journals and letters and such. But nowadays all our journals are recorded online in digitized forms that might be utterly erased in a split second. But then cant a library burn down in one instant also...
I end where I began, meh.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

What a lot of people in this thread are missing is that, up until very recently, you didn't need anything but good eyes and a decent light source to see data. You didn't need tape drives of a specific format, or floppy disc readers, or lasers; the mark 1 mod 0 eyeball and daylight were sufficient.

I understand that people are already having trouble with this; amusingly, this became a plot point in the TV series Flashpoint in one episode, where the key clue to unlocking the reason behind a crazed gunman's standoff was contained in eyewitness testimony from twenty-five years before... recorded on a Betamax cassette. Time is counting down, the bomb's ticking, and cops are trying to find a Beta-compatible VCR before it's too late... However the idea is even older; in Fredrick Pohl's Heechee novels human prospectors discover the ruins of an alien settlement in an asteroid, and they don't even recognise that the aliens left behind entire libraries because the "books" aren't shaped like anything a human would use and have no markings visible to the naked eye. (The books end up being sold as cheap souveniers to tourists because they're shiny and pretty.)

Printed material, on the other hand, is incredibly durable. Recently scientists discovered a lost mathematical treatise by Archimedes [http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes], written 2200 years ago, despite the de-inking and re-use of the paper to make a prayer book fifteen-hundred years later. (Admittedly, this time they used some super-cool tech... but not to guess the format, only to clarify what could be seen by the naked eye.)

Fifteen-hundred years from now, what are future historians (or, if we're unlucky, archeologists) going to make of Blu-Ray? Will they have the specifications to even be able to read one, or recognise it as anything but a pretty-shiny bangle probably used for decoration?

As someone who took some archeology and a lot of history, it does concern me a bit.

-- Steve

 

[luckshot]

so they're worried that by collecting information that they'll get a lot of junk? so their answer is to stop collecting information?

do their information collecting devices only have one setting? isn't that why you have techs go through it with you, to eliminate all that garbage?

 

[Anton P. Nym]

What a lot of people in this thread are missing is that, up until very recently, you didn't need anything but good eyes and a decent light source to see data. You didn't need tape drives of a specific format, or floppy disc readers, or lasers; the mark 1 mod 0 eyeball and daylight were sufficient.

Not entirely true. For decades now, libraries have archived data on microfilm, which in turn required machines to read.

I suppose... but if you absolutely must you can use a machine as simple as a magnifying glass to read microfilm. (A microscope or projector would be better, though.) It still recognisably contains data, and doesn't require a particular codec to extract it... an obstacle I found a decade ago while trying to recover data from my old, fried MFM hard drive.

-- Steve

 

[Limos]

I don't care about pictures. I don't care what I looked like at the time, no one else cares either. Why should I save a bunch of inane snapshots?

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I don't care about pictures. I don't care what I looked like at the time, no one else cares either. Why should I save a bunch of inane snapshots?

There probably isn't a reason YOU should save pictures. After all, presumably you were there for the events and can probably remember them. The reason they are important is because those who follow you might, for some reason or another, want to know about the things you did.

 

[AceDiamond]

While I do think we should keep reccords and 'relics/artifacts' of what has happened I don't think that we've neglected to do this in this day and age.

Computer hard drives, Compact Discs, DVD/Bluray, digital photos, memory sticks...the list goes on, it is safe to say that we have plenty of ways of keeping track of the many events that have happened in the interest of telling future generations what happened 'back in the day' (while they sit on the chair next to you, wishing you'd shut up while they play Halo Wars 6 on their Xbox-portableXIV).

Data storage relying on anything magnetic is not infinite. Like paper it too will degrade over time. Hard drives burn out, CDs and DVDs become unreadable to the ravages of time...Solid-state memory might hold up better, as might flash memory, but I don't know for sure.

But I believe that in some way, enough information will be preserved for future generations.

 

[tendo82]

An Assyriology professor of mine once joked that when aliens land on our scorched earth 10,000 years from now the only writings they'll find are the little clay cunieform tablets by the ancient near-eastern civilizations

 

[mattaui]

The entire Internet is like one big, if very lossy, backup device. Chances are, what you're looking for is out there, somewhere, if you can just pinpoint the exact location. Compare this to how most information was stored for the rest of human history. Sure, you had some stuff that was literally etched on stone that withstood the ages, but that's a tiny fraction of all the information humanity had created prior to the information age. Untold amounts of information was 'stored' only through oral tradition for a very long time, and we'll never know how much of that we lost. After that, it was all written on extremely fragile parchment and paper, the vast majority of which was likewise lost.

Part of this has to do with the tremendous amount of information we create now, each of us, every day. Blog entries, texts, random photos - even if a tiny fraction of a percentage of those survives, it will be vastly more information than we had before the advent of such technology. Just because there's more of it now, doesn't mean that we have to preserve it all to have insight into the life and times of the early 21st century.

Short of the total collapse of human civilization or nuclear annihilation, there will always be ways of retrieving information from old formats. It may not be convenient, but it'll be a far cry from being in an irrecoverable black hole. In fact, it will take something catastrophic and wide-reaching to even come close to wiping out the explosion of information we've created.

 

[CanadianWolverine]

I've got this history degree thing and all i can think of is "meh"
Somehow I dont expect life to ever be easy for the historian, if you arent struggling through Linear B, you're working with Punic Greek, and in one thousands years they'll be working with C++ and Binary wondering how the frick we were ever so primitive.
The main issue that is facing historians is that the rift between idealized societies and the real society will remain. Basically what gets left behind is what the society TRIES to leave behind so they look good, but isn't necessarily what life actually was like. So sure we know all about the rich citizens of Greece but we know absolutely nothing about their slaves. In the same manner we know far more about Noble lords and leaders than we do about some average peasant. THis changed considerably around the 1800s because people started journals and letters and such. But nowadays all our journals are recorded online in digitized forms that might be utterly erased in a split second. But then cant a library burn down in one instant also...
I end where I began, meh.

This. I was wondering if anyone else was considering reading, writing, and arithmetic when considering that the past is pretty friggin dark as is, so I'm not sure how it would be any different. Surely literacy rates have a great deal to do with the supposed detritus of digital information, which I personally think is for our benefit in getting properly introspective on humanity and improving its lot. Personally, I think the historians are underestimating the power of copy/paste though available to us when it comes to the internet in preserving information for the annals of time - which I think the post above me more articulately puts it.