Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Over 2000 years ago a chap called Philodemus sits in the library of a luxurious villa owned by a rich guy who likes collecting art and writing. He writes his thoughts on pleasure, and the relationship between the quantity of something and the pleasure that might derive from it. The scroll goes on the shelves with the others. He writes lots. At some point later the villa is covered by lava from mt vesuvius.

2000 years later we scan the carbonised scrolls with (basically) magic rays and use thinking machines to reconstruct what Philodemus wrote.

I wish we could tell him. Sounds like he was a thinker, he would really appreciate it.

View on HN

I have too wild imagination sometimes. I picture him with a shocked look on his face, similar to what one of the modern 'thinkers' would have if they forgot to clear their browser history and somehow someone restored it in the future.

"You recovered... uh... everything?"

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended.

And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic.

This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

Big if.

We’ll lose a lot of digital data simply because we won’t have the means to read it. CD-readers aren’t manufactured anymore in volume. It’s easy to imagine society in 40 years not having any CD readers handy but having a bunch of CDs they want to read. Now multiply that by all the funny storage formats we’ve created over the years.

No need for a CD reader if you have a CT scanner and software that converts those ridges into bits. The bigger question is how well preserved those CDs will be.

I’m almost certain it is impossible to actually do what I said. But then again, I bet anybody 2000 years ago would say the same of reading scrolls that have been consumed by a volcano!

> rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete,

On HDDs. On SSDs it'll lead to now-unusued space getting TRIMed which actually erases the blocks. Back to scraping the papyrus.

Your comment prompted me to go in search of something I'd seen several years ago: something about an advertisement in Pompeii for prostitutes, or something like that. Anyway, I couldn't find exactly what I went in search of, but I did stumble upon this oddly specific, yet interesting, Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_art_in_Pompeii_and_Herc...

Priapus had it goin' on! Reading the Priapeia for the first time is a treat...

> something about an advertisement in Pompeii for prostitutes, or something like that

Maybe something along these lines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupanar#Graffiti

Epicureans were atomists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Physics), so if you explained it to him, he might not be nearly as shocked as most people of the era would be. Epicureans also tended to invoke extremely insubstantial 'images' composed of especially tiny gossamer arrangements of atoms as explanations for things like dreams, and you can see how well that would work as an analogy with using X-rays to look at subtle changes in the arrangement of atoms in charred scrolls. (These are covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura - if you have some time, I highly recommend reading Stalling's rhyming translation. You'll be shocked and admire the rationality & scientificness of Epicurean materialist atomist explanations of the world, even where they get it totally wrong.)

It's a testimony to the power of mind equivalent to Einstein's 'Gedankenexperimenten'. The only reason they got some of it totally wrong is because they lacked the scientific apparatus to test their hypothesis, but they were on the right track.

Eh. The Epicurean arguments are heavily empirical; Lucretius throws in a lot of examples or familiar observations. I'm not sure how many I would describe as purely 'thought experiments'.

In the case of atoms I think it's pretty clear that they lacked direct proof, they only had indirect ways of experimentation and I think to be able to reason about the 'indivisible' at a time when nothing that you could physically look at (this was well before microscopes) was indivisible is more of a mental than an empirical thing.

... and what would he think of us, 2000 years later thought has led us to amazing advances in technology that would be inconceivable to him. But the sort of things the people of his day thought about, virtue, happiness, how to live the right way, not a lot of progress has been made. He might be surprised by that. In his time at the dawn of written thought-for-thoughts sake, they might have reasonably expected that soon people might think their way to a golden age of happiness and contentment. But 2000 years later we have learnt that you dont seem to be able to think your way to happiness.

I think we have learned not that you can’t think your way to happiness, but that for the sake of the consumer economy and worker productivity it’s best that you don’t.

Maybe in 20 years when resurrection is possible (singularity event) we'll be able to let him know?

Ash, not lava.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com