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.
And stuff like that is absolutely facinating to me, in small doses anyway. I keep a journal and I think I’ll write a few pages about what my routine is. At home on the weekend and at work.
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
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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
I can’t even remember most of high school
I can’t remember what I ate last week
Then we just wouldn’t ask that one person about history.
Unless we were immortal and capable of remembering everything, we’d need history.
I don’t see that as sad. Also, even if we lived four hundred years we’d still need to write things down because we’d eventually die.
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 😁😀😀😬😐😕😥😭
Yes it does…
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.
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.
I would say considering homo sapiens have been around for ~250,000 years we need a lot of decimal places… if you want to consider prior homo species that’s 2.8 million years and honestly you might as well call it 100%.
Until we figure out time travel that is!
Probably more like 99,999…%
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.
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.
I had a thought about this on a toke and walk. Imagine all the artisans over the course of human existence. All the skills and tricks they learned to just exist and live. Like a hunter tieing the ends of their bow in a slightly different way so it would work better with what they had, or a cook who figured out a more interesting way to make pasta or something. All that is just lost to the sands of time. That’s okay, humanity is struggling along just fine. Still left me wondering, what do we not know?
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.
Yeah, I think as long as we can count on some level of society, we have a shot at longer term preservation. Like, computers will continue to get faster, and mediums will continue to get upgraded and transferred and so forth, and we’re kind of already at a point where nothing recorded today needs to be “lost” with some careful planning. There are obvious holes in this, but it’s increasingly less likely to be a problem that the storage medium is the issue (again, caveating that we’re not talking about rebuilding society after a catastrophe or something) and more a problem with what the dependency of reading the data to be saved is, whether it’s transferred on storage formats that maintain data integrity, etc.
Like, we can do redundant backups and so forth, but what if the things we’re backing up are server dependent? Or even simpler shit like Flash games. I really hope that more people writing software especially think about how to keep it usable for a long time.
They won’t dig through it manually. They’ll have better bulk data processing than even the NSA has today.
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.
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.
They’re crying because of the comma
I really want to know what that’s doing there. Like, what did they think that was supposed to do?
Dramatic pause maybe?
Commas don’t do that; that’s what em dash is for.
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
The photo will never replicate the experience, but you can use it as a cue to go back to that place in your mind!
Agreed. Partially. I find myself looking back at pics and experiencing something much different.
Similarly, I can retrace a route again and see things I completely missed before. Memory is fun :)
Glowworm Caves yesterday, many sunsets, the impact of the view of rolling hills on your eyes vs recorded etc.
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.
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.
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.
. 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
This is bias towards a specific type of societal structure.
Lots of peoples with rich, complex and fascinating cultures continued to live successful nomadic lives for centuries past the introduction of agriculture.
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.
What boiling water with coal does to a motherfucker.
Pre-agrarian humans had more in common with beasts than with us. We were basically just another migratory animal subject to the migration patterns of our prey and seasonal growth. We have had the misfortune to see what feral humans who survived in isolation behave like.
The larger scale cooperation required for agriculture is when we began to diminish behaving as such.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Sanichar
We are products of our environments.
This is the dumbest “im so smart and edgy” comment I’ve ever seen. what we call a feral human today haa zero relation to life in pre-agrarian societies, also the idea that people …going to places were food will be makes them mindless zombies is so ridiculous thatI don’t even know where to start
20 minutes of looking into archeological sites will show you how complex and cooperative non-agrarian society’s were (I’m saying non here instead of pre because there are many instances of societies developing agriculture and then moving away from it due to various social/environmental factors)
Yeah. People seem to forget that the people in our past are exactly the same as us. They had fun, loved each other, got upset, got happy, worked together. They just didn’t have the advancements we have. Just because they went where food was doesn’t make them any less human. What else were they gonna do? Starve? They needed to eat, and they didn’t know of any alternative reliable way of getting food besides hunting since they didn’t figure out farming yet.
That’s what the authorities want you to think. They don’t consider anything civilized unless it’s suffering under their rule.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilis#Latin
It literally just means “living in a city”
The first and longest lasting of all prisons.
Go live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, then. Stop wasting society’s resources.
I give more to society than you or the parasites you worship.
Lol he is crying throught his nose
This is why I’m really hoping that the idea of quantum archeology turns out to be more science than bullshit.
There are so many crazy possibilities that will probably never happen, I love imagining what the world would be like if we could look through a time window - my daydream is normally about sending probes back to the point in space earth used to be and how fascinating the debates about where to look first would be, knowing it’s going to take years to get there and record it with everyone debating and getting anxious as to what it’ll see.
Like imagine how much information you’d get from fifteen minutes 4k footage of a Roman senate debate, and how disappointing it’d be after all that anticipation if you get a day or was closed. Still a billion things to obsess over in the image but disappointing when you’re hoping to see ceaser speak
Of course trying to catch sight of Jesus would be a huge project, I imagine it like those grifts where people go looking for the arc. What do they do if there’s no sign? What do they do if when they look nothing is anything like expected - would be so many people trying to find clues to what actually happened, at some point someone is going to find something really wild like they finally find someone from the Bible but it’s Jesus mate Judas laughing about how rich they’re getting pulling the reward money and rescue scam from the good the bad and the ugly…
And the people scouring to get clips for their YouTube channel, histories biggest cringe moments, wildest parties in history, luckiest trick shots ever…
Imagine setting up to see Calígula, and he talks just like Trump.
What I would find absolutely crazy is someone having no idea how this technology that we find ubiquitous, but the far future doesn’t have a clue about it, so someone gets out his Quantum Resurrection machine and brings back Millenial Grandpa to explain how the cartridge needs to be blown into
I’m not really sure what quantum archeology is, but another possibility is that, should we ever discover a way of circumventing the speed of light, you could fly millions of light-years away and set up a big-ass telescope to watch past earth. It’d only work if we discover a way of travelling ftl though, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll accomplish that in our lifetimes.
Basically it’s this idea that you can date online the universe itself to restore anything or anyone from the past
We could point our telescopes at black holes and look at our past light they fling back at us
