Impermanance

Reading about relics left by past civilisations, which has collasped and died out due to environmental damage which leads to shortage of resources and food eventually leading to declining living standards and starvation or war. Jared Diamond did a really impressive synthesis by compiling data from the Polynesians, Mayans, Anasanzis and even presented case studies of modren day studies in his recent book, Collapse, how societies choose to fail or succeed.

Archeologists found out alot about these past through carbon dating of architecture, palynology, looking at pottery and other remnants of civilisation left behind. These relics survived several thousand years of change and surfaced again to offer us a glimpse of what life was like then.

What do we have?

Terabytes of infromation, pictures, art pieces, all converted into binary which were stored in servers which can one day crash and just become a piece of meaningless metal and plastic. Increasingly our information is in a 'disposable' form. We can simply erase days of with a click of a button. We store our writings onto servers. Our clothing are meant to last only a few years, I need to mention our shoes.

Most valuable items now are insured with hefty sums of money. What insurance do we have for our history? What happens when our era comes to a past? How will we be judged and assessed? Or will we have nothing at all? Just rusting pieces of metal of a civilisation which vanished into thin air and left no records of their language and culture. Or even more interestingly, we might be evaluated on the relics we preserved. So scientists may be puzzling over how we can create such sophisticated machines like air planes but only use rudimentary symbols to communicate.

That will be interesting.