I wonder sometimes how future historians will ever know as much about us as we like to think, and that maybe, our writings will be lost one day.
What is history, and what is 'pre-history' or 'pre-historic'? I'm assuming that history started from the time when man was able to write (in whatever way/language that they did) and 'pre-history' is the tens of thousands of years before that. An era where no records of writings exist, and we can only go on fossilised evidence or the odd cave paintings to paint a picture of their civilisations.
So what will future historians have to go on when they look back at us? Writings and paintings last the test of time because they are imprinted on hard copies of paper, canvas, wood etc.. but as we swim ever more so through the digital age, much of our modern writings exist as bits and bytes.
People go on about things such as blogging as creating a record of our times, something that future historians will have a field day with. Never before, they say, has the human race ever been able to create such a detailed record of our era and the part we played in history.
Which is all well and good, but what if, in a million years time, we've advanced so far, that we've simply forgotten what a computer used to be or how to build one. I mean, give it another fifty years, and our children will look at a VHS cassette and ask what it is. A VHS cassette is pretty useless unless you know how to build a VHS player on which to play it.
Similarly, a CD or DVD just looks like a shiny mirror unless you know what it is, and can build a machine that can read the data on it. Why would anyone, in a million years, look at it, and even begin to assume that it contained any kind of data? It's just a shiny disk unless you recognise it for what it is.
We dig up ancient texts and writings all the time, and we recognise it as some kind of communication device simply by the way that it's been drawn or written on, but will future archaeologists be so knowledgeable when digging up our Cd's, DVDs or Hard Drives?
They might in the next thousand years. They might even be able to in the next ten thousand years. But what about the next hundred thousand years? A million years? Surely it'll all look extremely puzzling by then. And even if some bright spark finds these Cd's and thinks that there's more than meets the eye, will he/she be able to build a machine that can actually extract the data on it?
Did the Inca's think that their civilisation was destined to be recorded in much greater detail than it actually was? Did the Egyptians think that their writings would last an eternity, only for us modern humans to still have great trouble in understanding it? Are we not going down an even worse path, by putting all our historical data on electronically read disks instead of hard copies?
Will we simply be forgotten? Are we living in the modern equivalent of the dark/middle ages? (called so because very little evidence exists of their era's)
Spooky.
