Unlikely. Wikipedia can be backed up on a thumb drive, and millions of various storage media are being produced every year, perhaps into perpetuity. The damaged media are replaced faster than they break. Even something as cataclysmic as Chicxulub isn’t going to wipe all of them, and probably not even all humans who will continue carrying the content forward. We are the species best suited for eternal preservation so far as we know.
Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won’t last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth’s core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can’t build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we’re pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that’s supposed to last.
Humans are going to persist through the various existential threats, current and future. Some of those impact how inhospitable the future becomes, but we are just breaking out of the dark age of complex life’s timeline. The progress of our species is still accelerating despite the setbacks. Humans are going to keep the data with them, because storage technologies are not going to regress. It doesn’t matter if today’s storage is fragile and prone to decay.
Pretty bold statement there. However, it’s just the civilization that needs to perish, not mankind, for our knowledge to be lost within a few decades.
Considering the number of civilisations that have perished (like, there were quite a lot) vs the number of civilizations that have persisted (uh… One? Which is young and just hasn’t dissolved yet) I’d say the chances for that to happen is definitely not zero. It’s not necessarily one either, of course.
You think computers will still work after the collapse of modern society? Unless we keep building giant machines run on fossil fuels we are completely unable to produce computer parts, how the fuck would these processes survive something as devastating to people as a damn near Extinction level event. I doubt people would have much thoughts other than “Where food?” after we are basically wiped off earth
After the collapse of modern society happens on a global scale, I will apologize to you in person. Otherwise, we can presume I am right and humans are going to go on forever. It’s not going to be a comfortable ride for most, but our species is going to reach the point where the ones standing in the way of progress are no longer wielding the most power. At least long enough to get the worst threats handled.
You assume society will never go downhill until proven otherwise? Nothing lasts forever and we think we are invincible. We have built a house of cards, delicately held up by fossil fuels that are also going to be our downfall. Renewable energy/electric cars are a PR stunt to increase the demand of energy while making very few changes. We are fucked in like 30 years or less lol if you can’t picture a world without our society you must not have given it much thought :)
Quite the opposite. Society has been moving up hill this whole time, with downhill slides now and then. Climate change is possibly the worst slide, but the ones who make it the worst are dying off as their generation hits the end of their life expectancy. Gen Z and younger have very different priorities from the older generations. Millennials lean similarly, are building political power and hopefully fast enough to prevent the worst of Gen X from following in their predecessors’ footsteps. Society isn’t going to vanish just because sea levels rise. Society is near-global now, something that has never happened before; it is not comparable to some hunter-gatherer band that over-hunted their food supply.
How do you know we were never global before? We don’t have much evidence besides dozens of giant pyramids, but there seems to be a case to be made for a global civilization in the distant past.
Unlikely. Wikipedia can be backed up on a thumb drive, and millions of various storage media are being produced every year, perhaps into perpetuity. The damaged media are replaced faster than they break. Even something as cataclysmic as Chicxulub isn’t going to wipe all of them, and probably not even all humans who will continue carrying the content forward. We are the species best suited for eternal preservation so far as we know.
Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won’t last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth’s core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can’t build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we’re pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that’s supposed to last.
Humans are going to persist through the various existential threats, current and future. Some of those impact how inhospitable the future becomes, but we are just breaking out of the dark age of complex life’s timeline. The progress of our species is still accelerating despite the setbacks. Humans are going to keep the data with them, because storage technologies are not going to regress. It doesn’t matter if today’s storage is fragile and prone to decay.
Pretty bold statement there. However, it’s just the civilization that needs to perish, not mankind, for our knowledge to be lost within a few decades.
Considering the number of civilisations that have perished (like, there were quite a lot) vs the number of civilizations that have persisted (uh… One? Which is young and just hasn’t dissolved yet) I’d say the chances for that to happen is definitely not zero. It’s not necessarily one either, of course.
You think computers will still work after the collapse of modern society? Unless we keep building giant machines run on fossil fuels we are completely unable to produce computer parts, how the fuck would these processes survive something as devastating to people as a damn near Extinction level event. I doubt people would have much thoughts other than “Where food?” after we are basically wiped off earth
After the collapse of modern society happens on a global scale, I will apologize to you in person. Otherwise, we can presume I am right and humans are going to go on forever. It’s not going to be a comfortable ride for most, but our species is going to reach the point where the ones standing in the way of progress are no longer wielding the most power. At least long enough to get the worst threats handled.
You assume society will never go downhill until proven otherwise? Nothing lasts forever and we think we are invincible. We have built a house of cards, delicately held up by fossil fuels that are also going to be our downfall. Renewable energy/electric cars are a PR stunt to increase the demand of energy while making very few changes. We are fucked in like 30 years or less lol if you can’t picture a world without our society you must not have given it much thought :)
Quite the opposite. Society has been moving up hill this whole time, with downhill slides now and then. Climate change is possibly the worst slide, but the ones who make it the worst are dying off as their generation hits the end of their life expectancy. Gen Z and younger have very different priorities from the older generations. Millennials lean similarly, are building political power and hopefully fast enough to prevent the worst of Gen X from following in their predecessors’ footsteps. Society isn’t going to vanish just because sea levels rise. Society is near-global now, something that has never happened before; it is not comparable to some hunter-gatherer band that over-hunted their food supply.
How do you know we were never global before? We don’t have much evidence besides dozens of giant pyramids, but there seems to be a case to be made for a global civilization in the distant past.