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Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

I think about this a lot, our footprint as seen by future anthropologists.

I've thought about it a little. If everything is digital and in deprecated formats then there could be a sort of "dark ages"... even without some kind of end of world scenario to wipe out the evidence. We could simply just forget how to access it. Eg: in yr 3030 will we still know how to open pdfs ,flash files, or say PS4 games?

We have a lot of documentation and clues, so it shouldn't be that bad. There are decades of rants about the shortcomings of the pdf format, at least :)

Those formats are also more logical(ish) than human language, so reverse engineering them should be possible in some cases.

Also, there will be plenty of 'rosetta stones' around: media that exists in both an obsolete format and a more recent, better understood one.

Very interesting points. Thanks for giving me food for thought

There’s already “digital dark ages” and it’s a reason archive.org and retro tech collection is so important.

From the 70s-90s most consumer tech was thrown in land fill when people were finished with it. There wasn’t yet much of a “collector” mentality because it wasn’t old enough to be cool, and there was such a mad rush to always have the newest developments in that tech-honeymoon period that people threw the old stuff out.

Then for the software side, storage was expensive and complicated. People didn’t keep copies of every single old thing like lots of people do now, websites were purged of old content to fit new content, versioning in development didn’t really exist (on a large scale).

I’m a retro tech/software collector and there’s plenty of stuff from my childhood that I can’t find a single trace of anymore.

I'm curious if there is an aggregation site for "lost" things? Something where people can put traces but indicate it missing? (eg an advertisement for a game that we can't find the cartridge) ?

"Why do you think people in the 20th century used to bury some women with bags of plastic on their chest? Surely some religious ritual but I found no mention of it."

(silicone is not bio-degradable, right?)

My vague, hand-wavy recollection is that breast implants are a problem for crematories.

So I'm guessing it's also not biodegradable.

Edit:

The 1,500-degree Fahrenheit heat of cremation will burn away all of the body's natural substances, leaving the bones to be ground up

Silicone implants remain behind as a goo, while metal implants, like hip replacements, remain completely intact

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3228354/Mortician...

Bold of you to assume that future anthropologists will do anything other than fighting in World Water War II.

If we make it that far.

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