As the Buddha said, all is impermanent.
— Conan O'Brien
https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hid...
Eventually, most graveyards will simply erode away. The average erosion rate is 0.2 mm/year, so 2 meters down will be exposed in about 10,000 years. YMMV
If one discovers the name some millennia later, the character and its quirks are at best reconstructed rather than remembered, so you have the equivalent of a Frankenstein simulation of the original.
After researchers lose interest in them, that's the third death. At that point, the entity waits in inexistence without hope for some future PhD candidate with a good idea/proposal. The citation count is probably what's left until then, until Google shuts Scholar down.
Maybe Gilgamesh, who may well have been a historical king of Uruk sometime between 2900 – 2350 BCE.
Enmebaragesi[1] probably existed around 2600 BCE but not much is known about him other than he was a King of Kish.
Figures in the old testament Bible are hard to track but the stories of Nimrod (grandson of Noah) seems to have been placed around 2000 BCE
They're just dates, but each one made me pause for thought of the joy, and the despair of each of the family groups.
https://www.bridgelawllp.com/they-say-we-die-twice/#:~:text=....
It's bittersweet but probably a good thing.
But hey, it's not all bad. We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it.
And for all it pangs our hearts to see our ephemera tend to dust, we also I think are, of any human generation to date, probably best able to hope that the things we really love from our time will be preserved. (I hope that's a distinction we don't end up holding on to...)
In just the last little while I've been getting to see that peculiarly ingenuous sort of joy again, as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs.
That's a show that makes a habit of trying to tell the audience things they'll hope never to forget. It does so wonderfully. It's a story I cherish, and if someone half my age will perforce love it at least somewhat differently from how I do - so what? That the story remain loved is enough.
I dunno if any of that's any use to you, but share it in the hope it'll do you the same small good it did me, thinking on this of a quiet evening.
What show are you referring to? Consider my curiosity piqued!
It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...)
That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.
Can you explain what causes you to say that we will be the last generation to say this? Not rhetorical, although this caused me to question it because I think that this is probably a constant wrt generations passing onto the next and unlikely to change.
We now face a kind of reverse problem though where we're drowning in so much content that some interesting things can be missed or lost.