[keeler]

I wonder as well. I've really enjoyed reading about all of the findings that have come out of Pompeii and Herculaneum in recent years: the graffiti[0], the fast food joint that looks like it could be a Chipotle or a Subway[1], and articles like this. It all feels pretty _recent_, even though it was 2000 years ago.

I think that people 2000 years from now will have a lot more information about our time to go on, though. We disseminate and preserve information at a scale that did not exist back then. The sole surviving written record of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption -- and perhaps the earliest written record of any volcanic eruption -- comes from two letters written by Pliny the Younger.[2] Today, news of the event would be spread near-instantaneously (and presumably preserved in multiple locations), like news of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Back then, there was just the dissemination of paper(-like) copies.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie...

[1] https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancien...

[2] https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...

[colechristensen]

In a lot of ways roman civilization fits much better into “nearly industrialized” than “millennia old” and you have to remember that a whole lot of what became western civilization was invented by romans.

Really there were only a few missing big ideas and a few organizational failures in the way of, say, someone landing on the moon a thousand years ago. The fall of the empire set the species back perhaps as much as 1500 years.

[officialjunk]

i fear a lot of our data will be lost, in particular digital data. it's already getting difficult to access data in formats/form-factors from within a single lifetime. from the decay of the magnetization to the details of encoding.

[fapjacks]

If you think decay of magnetization is the limiting factor to digital longevity, I'm sorry to report that intentional bitrot will destroy any hope of retrieval long before the spinning platters fail. I'd suggest an experiment: Think of some major news event you can remember from even 10 years ago, find a news story about it online, and then just follow the links contained therein. Not only is Google shaping what you can see, but so is everyone else. God bless the Internet Archive.

[WalterBright]

Even if 99.9% is lost, that still leaves behind far more than we have about the Romans.

I recall an hour-long history program on TV where a whole narrative was concocted out of the engraving of a gladiator's name on a stone.

[lumberingjack]

A lot of that information will be lost it costs a lot of money to store data on the internet nowadays when nobody's paying the bill it just gets lost.

We bought an old tobacco farm in South Indiana almost every building it has these weird metal rings. historians said they were for tying up cattle and horses. But we found out recently that they were actually for farming equipment they would tether steam engines to ropes and then use these steel rings attached to buildings and trees to pull plows around with the steam engines.