From what I understand, a lot of knowledge was lost following the collapse of the Roman Empire as manuscripts were no longer being copied at the established frequency and information that had lost relevance (for certain jobs etc.) wasn’t being passed down.

If a catastrophic event were to happen nowadays, how much information would we theoretically lose? Is the knowledge of the world, stored digitally or on printed books, safer than it was before?

All the information online for example - does that have a greater chance of surviving millennia than say a preserved manuscript?

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    EMP really doesn’t affect nearly as much as we’ve been lead to believe.

    A direct lightning bolt to a car (millions of volts), doesn’t destroy the ECM - a car will start right up afterwards.

    An EMP is a magnetic field - an impacted device must attenuate that field (i.e. act like an antenna) to generate an electrical pulse on it’s circuits. Plus the energy of any field dissipates as a square of the distance. Trying to get millions of volts into a device via magnetic pulse is a serious challenge.