Probably more like 99,999...%
Well how far back are we talking? 200,000 years or just since writing was invented. Technically those cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago could be telling historic events of some kind but if we even just say “only since 5000BCE” and only consider events of significant historic consequence shaping any given region (as opposed to neighbors starting a blood fued by shitting in each others yurts), then it’s STILL probably like 90% lost which is just wild.
Is it history and not ancient times if it is not recorded?
I would like to add:
Imagine all of the recorded history that was destroyed.
Want to feel sadder? Humanity has existed on Earth in its current form for about 200,000 years.
We've only had civilization for about 10,000.
That means humans spent about 180,000 years throwing rocks, sticks, and presumably feces at each other in the dirt before we entertained the idea of working together for mutual benefit. With all of our present senses and capacities at our disposal.
Just incase anyone ever wonders why it's so difficult for humanity to do what's best for itself. We only do what's in our best interests after we've fully exhausted all the bad options several times over.
that's not really true. 10,000 years ago is about when we developed agriculture, stopped roaming as much, and started writing in some form that could survive the millennia, but we've been living and working together since long before we were ever recognizably human.
In addition, we keep pushing key invention dates back further and further as we discover more archaeological evidence. It’s quite possible we were doing human things long before we think we did.
This is another thing that seems really weird to me. The explosion of technological development in the last 300 years or so compared to the preceding several thousand is pretty wild.
We never stopped throwing feces and I guarantee we were more close to each other in prehistory than we are now. We've been waging war for as long as we could record it.
Feels like we're doing our best to make up for that now with pics and video from almost everyone on the planet hitting the interwebs.
I pity the historian that has to try to dig through all of it.
That's if it survives. Entropy has a go at everything.
Funny how some older media are so much better for longevity, like CDs.
And the expected lifespan is still only 50-100 years.
That's a speck of sand it the human history.
Tape disk drives and tapes are actually some of the longest lasting, when stored properly. Tape isn't great for active data needs, where you need to read/write the data regularly. Super slow for that. But it's killer for writing once and then dropping it in storage.
Anyway, same thing with tapes, the length of time they last is a fraction of history, on top of needing proprietary hardware to play them.
For example, there was that recently unearthed pilot of a sketch comedy show from Monty Python's Graham Chapman and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy's Douglas Adams. It's not particularly great, but it was lost to time except for a copy that Chapman had recorded to tape when the show first aired.
Problem was, that tape was so old when it was discovered, it pre-dated VHS and Betamax and was in a format that literally no players existed for anymore. This lead to a long effort to rebuild a player from scratch, which they eventually succeeded, and now it lives on YouTube for weird comedy nerd historians.
Anyway, the point being is that the mediums are short-term storage, for all intents and purposes, and that pretty much goes for all types of media humans uses, going as far back as stone tablets and books. The ones that survived were lucky and most are lost to time due to destruction or environmental degradation. At least with stone tablets and paper all you needed was to understand the language it was written in. Now we're going to need electricity and knowledge of historical data storage practices and technologies.
So, we're always losing history, and people who go out of their way to preserve history and put it in modern formats to attempt to keep the data from disappearing forever are doing a service to future human history. I would say, in this way, pirates who remove DRM from media are taking part in an act of historical preservation.
Depends. In some ways you are correct but in other ways not so much. We like to think in the digital age once its up, its up forever. In theory yes but in some ways no since we have already seen in recent memory. Hell the popularity of lemmy and the fedeverse was kicked off because many of us left reddit, lead to many of us basically deleting/editing our prior comments. Someone can possibly have a snapshot of it but the chances of it are pretty small for some weird random obscure post on a forum. Our reliance on free services can easily lead to something disappearing as easily as it appeared. Hell we are seeing some youtube videos basically disappearing over fears of Ai scraping and it can happen abruptly.
Not only that; websites get deleted, servers can fail, data can be corrupted, business toss out memory storage when going out business, etc.
Nothing in the digital lasts.
That's making some assumptions about what society looks like in the future. I'm guessing it's more likely they'll be looking over the device you used to type that message wondering what the hell it was used for.
Here's something even sadder. We only need history because human lives are so short.
I mean... Even if you lived forever one person can't remember everything
Which, to bring some happiness into this, we are the only species that we know of that can record our history, no matter how short our lives are. So since most of our content produced now is tik tok, that will be our new history 😁😀😀😬😐😕😥😭
The real problem we have now is that there is so much information, we cannot store it all. You can't just throw things out either because you truly have no idea what seemingly worthless things we produce are going to be deemed of significant value later on.
That old blurry photograph of your great aunt with a photo bomb of some random dude? It is the only photo of the zodiac killer. That random shitty video in portrait mode of you driving through your home town in Kansas is the only surviving footage of what used to exist there before the 2046 asteroid impact that wiped out the state.
You just never know what truly matters until its gone.
Just keep extending the horizon until it doesn't matter again 😌
Sometimes, when hiking, I'll see something incredible, and when I go to capture it in a photo, it just doesn't come out the same.
Those vistas are allllll for me
Glowworm Caves yesterday, many sunsets, the impact of the view of rolling hills on your eyes vs recorded etc.
Anyone who has ever had to dig through an overly verbose log file is fine with this. 90% of what happens is tediously mundane.
And you are ultimately going to die as part of that 90% that won't be remembered for anything at all no matter how big of a deal you view yourself in any form function or manner.
Me too. It won't be so bad. Unless they check the hard drive. Oh buddy then we're historically remembered. Like, that's a lotta porn.
Eh, I'm not sure as much is truly lost as one might currently think.
There's a number of things that seem more like an issue of history as a field having challenges in undue influence of academic popularity contests and subspecialty isolation.
For example, the face of the historical basis for Helen of Troy has likely been on modern magazine covers, we just haven't broadly realized it because most modern historians throw out Herodotus wholesale so they've ignored the details in his version of the Helen narrative, which happens to connect the events to part of Egypt's history that's been similarly poorly evaluated by scholarship to date.
Even the way Homer and the Trojan War narrative gets handled is pretty ass backwards, with scholars preferring to just hand wave it as mythological history rather than seeing it as having combined a history of the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia in the LBA with a later sea peoples capture of Wilusa back from the Hittites in the EIA (it has rather impressive levels of detail around events tied to both these things).
We see modern debates about whether the Exodus narrative occurred or not as described in the Bible but there's very little investigation into the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the same which differ significantly from the Biblical version (notably about it being ethnocentric), even claiming the latter version was altered. Versions that might be quite relevant to recent archeological finds like the Aegean style pottery with local clay in Tel Dan or the imported bees from Anatolia in Tel Rehov.
Give it time. A lot of big topics that are generally dismissed or thought to be lost today might not still seem that way within a generation or two.
yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.
90% of the bullet points are unrecorded. If we're counting every Joe Smoe, then 99.9999...% is unrecorded.
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it...[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us... The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians...the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians...the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us...as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)
What’s more awful? Most of the history we know is biased in favour of the winners.
There's lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.
History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That's where the historical blind spots are.
In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.
Life isn't worth living just because it will be written down, so what if no one remembers, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I don't think your title is grammatically correct. «very» starts with a consonant and therefore should be «Does it not pierce thy very heart?».
The one good thing about leddit is that someone else usually writes comments like this, meaning I don't feel compelled to.
This is why I'm really hoping that the idea of quantum archeology turns out to be more science than bullshit.
I just want to know the lost and unrecorded meme that has so much potential
Found.
This was the peak. Every meme since this fella has been "thing good, thing bad".
I see it the other way around, we managed to pass on civilization for our children for 90% of the history without writing it down
Your brain deliberately forgets trivial stuff. Do you really need to remember every lunch you had? Same goes for all the mundane stuff in history.
On the other hand so little of the mundane stuff was recorded that when we do see it it can be a window into how people actually lived, like Samuel Pepys diary. The daily stuff was so accepted as boring and common knowledge that it wasn't considered worth recording.
Most of it was shit anyway and current history is shit too so it doesn’t matter.
Memes
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