Why are we making fun of the Sumerian copper merchant though? Because his customer wrote his complaint in clay in a climate that -- even 5,000 years ago -- was pretty dry.
We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.
So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.
What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.
So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.
But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.
>We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years.
There are over 3,000 towns with a population over 10,000 people in the US. Any random Middle school or Highschool library in those towns would be more than enough to give a future society an excellent grasp of modern science and engineering. There are also over 3,000 colleges in the US, whose libraries would expect to give advanced understanding.
Just because we now have unfathomably more information digitally than Sumerians ever had doesn’t mean we also don’t have unfathomably more information printed as well. If one set of encyclopedias in one grandma’s basement is found, that is more condensed knowledge than was produced by thousands of years of early societies.
Cool. Now they just have to last 10k years. I'll add that the last person I know to be in Colorado State University's library observed almost no books, Just computer stations.
We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.
So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.
What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.
So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.
But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.