We don't know tons of stuff about history because of lost information. The Library of Alexandria had tons of valuable information. The internet should be a way to get around that but...
As a history enthusiast, it’s both thrilling and concerning to think about how much we could potentially learn from our current era, yet still face the risk of losing it. The Library of Alexandria was a monumental repository of knowledge, and its loss left a significant gap in our understanding of the past.
People seem to think that South-of-Sahara Africa is "history-less" because of a lack of written history (there were griots, whose oral history might have provided a base for archaeological inquiry in the same way ancient writings with unreliable narrators, if not for the social disruptions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries); South America was treated similarly until archaeological rediscoveries helped to expand our understanding or pre-Colombian life and broaden imaginations.
Anyway, none of the civilizations in these regions had built nuclear technology, or influenced the emergence of treatment-resistant diseases, or generally altered the landscape to such an extent as we have (dams, holes in the ground, big tall chunks of metal and concrete). It is probably in the best interests of anyone living on this planet in the next few thousand years that they have some knowledge of how we've lived and why. "We built weapons that can each destroy land a day's walk wide because there was a war where the stakes were genocide" is maybe something that shouldn't be forgotten. Any number of other developments are also important. It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.
eleveriven|1 year ago
rrnechmech|1 year ago
underlipton|1 year ago
Anyway, none of the civilizations in these regions had built nuclear technology, or influenced the emergence of treatment-resistant diseases, or generally altered the landscape to such an extent as we have (dams, holes in the ground, big tall chunks of metal and concrete). It is probably in the best interests of anyone living on this planet in the next few thousand years that they have some knowledge of how we've lived and why. "We built weapons that can each destroy land a day's walk wide because there was a war where the stakes were genocide" is maybe something that shouldn't be forgotten. Any number of other developments are also important. It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.
Bluestein|1 year ago
Another good reason for widespread archival.-
Bluestein|1 year ago
doubled112|1 year ago