'Staying longer at home' was key to stone age technology change 60k years ago
phys.org
phys.org
From the headline I thought this was going to shed light on the so-called "great-leap forward" which is supposed to be about artifacts becoming more sophisticated (or perhaps just more artistic) at very roughly the same time period in different parts of the world.
> The beautiful Howiesons Poort industry with its long, thin blades is replaced at 58,000 years ago by a simple technology that could be rapidly produced.
> It is unknown what the vast majority of humans did during this period.
(because all of our facebooks, twitters, hn comments, softwares, etc are not physically tangible artifacts and will [hopefully] be lost in time)
> tell us again grandma about this "key-board" you had to smash your fingers into to speak to someone
I suspect storage will remain cheap enough most of these artifacts will survive, but it's going to be very difficult for future researchers to get a good idea of what 21st century life was like because the crap to content ratio is so high. Sorting through all those kitten videos and posts hardly anyone reads today will probably be more expensive and time consuming than it's worth.
In 58,000 years none of the data would be intact if not through pretty extreme efforts to preserve it.
I guess maybe we'll find ways to encode data onto physical media, but I don't think my facebook (or HN) posts are going to make the cut.
True, but someone will come up with a "databank" of sorts. Who knows, we might backup on DNA or space, as in cosmos.
Is what we type right now escaping in space like TV transmissions? Any physics major here?
BUT it is out there and an advanced civilization might figure it out (not that they might need it but curiosity)
No generation had a life so well preserved as we have. Whatever we can reconstruct about previous generations lives, future archeologists will get hundreds of times more.
And that's with very common software from only a quarter of a century ago! Heck, I've got files written in niche Mac OS X software from less than a decade ago that probably can no longer be read on a computer manufactured this year.
In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language.
OK, maybe plain text ASCII could be decoded by cryptographers highly familiar with Ancient English.
You might look up the Long Now project and how they're thinking about communicating 10,000 years into the future.
Sorry, but if there is any kind of document specification left, it should be trivial for whoever is left then (as long as they can grasp our 21th century plain language) to recreate a reader for an old format. With proprietary documents, that is just never going to be possible.
My best guess: none. These years might not be totally irrelevant, but no doubt they're boring. Last century was very exciting and next will bring some singularity or something, but right now? Very difficult to make it seem interesting.
Sometimes I wonder if this age is _too_ interesting.
- surrey-fringe, 2017
So please don't post comments pretending to know the intent of someone else's post.