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Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't have an example of such a complete collapse in the world since the arrival of globalization. It's easy to envision that a lot of knowledge will be conserved somewhere.
Yes, in our hard drives.
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
There isn't a lot of essential technology beyond energy, agriculture and mining. The biggest driving factor is actually making a society that rewards technological progress. Give that society half a millenia and it will invent computers again. If you wanted to let a society recover from technological collapse then you would merely need a list of possible inventions ordered by the date of their invention. 3D CAD model…
There's ideas that can survive long after devices turn to dust. The germ theory of disease. The Staff system. Ops planning. Cross-fertilization and hybridization. Optics. With these ideas, the devices can be recreated, and in a better sequence that we accidentally created them the first time.
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
A lot of modern resource extraction relies on easily available energy. The days of oil coming out of the ground or being able to dig for coal on the surface have long gone. My guess is you are right, once lost it won't be coming back.
If something happens in the world able to cause a collapse of our civilization - the preservation of knowledge will be the least of our problems. I see little point in trying to solve this issue. But while we are here - we can make copies of useful knowledge and try to have them as in tact as possible...
This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…
> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.
A lot of modern resource extraction relies on easily available energy. The days of oil coming out of the ground or being able to dig for coal on the surface have long gone. My guess is you are right, once lost it won't be coming back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in our hard drives.
No, in books and journals. We're still printing them by the billions every year. Software of various kinds might be lost, since we usually don't print them out. But the theory required to re-implement them are all available on paper, sitting in a library somewhere. A book on algorithms and data structures will be far more useful to a future civilization than raw source code for a hardware architecture that won't even…
Although I have a background in logic programming and I study logic-based machine learning for my PhD, I find that I often have trouble to understand important terminology - and I mean "important" in the sense that entire papers are based around it, but take it for granted that the reader is very familiar with the terms, what they mean, and how they're used.
For example, I recently struggled with the following terms: "finite axiomatization", "explanation-based learning", "constructive induction", "knowledge-level learning", "weakest preconditions", and others.
I eventually managed to get on top of those terms, sufficiently to read and understand the papers that used them. I did this by searching online for an explanation ("finite axiomatization" is used in mathematical logic) and by digging in the literature for terms that were defined in previous works. I found all of that material online, of course- and where I couldn't find a copy online, I basically had to "wing it" and hope I grokked it right. Searching for anything published even in a major AI conference or journal before the 1990's is a big pain and even university libraries seem to lack physical or electronic copies.
To conclude- yes, there are going to be various works left behind if civilisation collapses. But a lot of them are going to be like maps without the key. The people surviving us will be able to read them, but not able to understand them, because they will miss key knowledge, that is currently spread around hundreds of thousands of sources that only experts in niche sub-fields are even aware of.
Maybe a silly question but how well connected was the world during Greek and Persian civilisations? Shouldn't their ideas and works survive on neighbours empires that we have a good track record? I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations collapses.
You can find temples in Egypt decorated in Mycenean styles. Mycenean style pottery got everywhere. It was very modern.
Maybe a silly question but how well connected was the world during Greek and Persian civilisations? Shouldn't their ideas and works survive on neighbours empires that we have a good track record? I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations collapses.
Then there's the Silk Road who connected the Eurasian continent economic, cultural and political influence for centuries.
So, the spread of ideas across cultures is pretty much established.
The problem is that the survival of specific historic records across centuries or millennia is tenuous at best. First hand accounts are extremely rare and most of what we know about those times was handed down by copying what was deemed relevant throughout time.
Lesson number one each historian learns is to ask critical questions about the source material. Who wrote this? What do we know about the contemporary context? Does other material corroborate with what we are reading now? How about our own hindsight bias when reading records today? What about other biases that played out at the time?
Oftentimes, it's not possible to ascertain a theory or a hypothesis, how things actually went down, simply because we lack the source material. And just as often we may get caught unaware by our own assumptions that were handed down to us by teachers, authors, movies, art,...
As such, most historians will tell you that while it's plausible that the origins of some technologies root back further in time, there's little point in looking for evidence as there is simply no historic or archaeological record available. That's where you'll find that a falsifiable theory turns into mere speculation.
A historical researcher therefore only builds on top of verified sources. Much like a criminal investigator trying to establish the raw facts that support a given narrative.