this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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History Memes

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Such loss.... (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Yeah, so far almost all of our storage media are extremely ephemeral compared to papyrus, stone tablets or even just paper. I seriously doubt whether a normal harddrive will still be readable in 100 years. So far our solution is to just keep copying, but it's not hard to imagine that at some point, some calamity will wipe it all out (global natural disaster, computer virus, world gets taken over by authoritarian governments who want to rewrite history) or maybe future people just stop caring for a while and stop copying. It basically happened after the fall of the roman empire, paper books don't last millenia - you needed to keep copying them, by hand, to preserve them, and in that time they didn't have the resources for preserving the large body of books that existed in Rome. Plus, literacy in general declined considerably.