Wait, so the articles says that that around 60k years ago, at this particular site, people started staying put longer and the artifacts became less sophisticated.
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.
Less sophisticated but faster production was what I read:
> 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.
Oh wow, I need to google this. There's suggestion that many isolated examples of humans advancing in technological capability? So surely something environmental was at play on a global scale.
And there was a technology boom during the agricultural revolution, when people where able to become completely sedentary. And art/craft booms occurred when kingdoms were formed and could produce excess food, allowing excess labour to focus on things other than agricultural production.
Every time I buy a new computer I find the old hard disk fits in its entirety on the new one, leaving me with plenty of space to spare. I think I have four or five generations nested into the current one.
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.
This is a lot of people losing their drivers in a relatively short time.
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.
Some of it goes into space (if it's transmitted the right way), but most will be drowned in noise. None of that matters though, since you can't get in front of the outgoing signal to receive it at a future date. It would have to be reflected, which would also introduce a large amount of noise.
One day we will have cheap, reliable, ubiquitous digital storage that we don't even think about. Future archaeology will be about digital spelunking and untangling of massive amounts of data that isn't properly catalogued or given context.
I wonder how much of this information will be freely-exportable and copy able in the future. Or will we be stuck in "app silos" where all your information is tried to the App's data store and you can't get at it. If I'm using instagram for all of my pictures, will I always be able to take them with me when I migrate to a different platform/device?
That hard drive storage expansion you have experienced in the past few times is not sustainable. Hard disk platters are reaching a limit. SSD could beat that but they are way more expensive than HDD for the same storage space.
And how much of that data is in outdated formats that it's now almost impossible to read? If I could still find my middle school papers written using WordPerfect 5.1 or MS Write, and if the floppies were still legible, would I be able to open them in software that runs on my current operating system without emulation? How long would it take to find something to read them with?
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 term of tens of years, MAYBE that helps. My guess is that ODF, for instance, will be harder to find readers for 50 years from now than DOCX will.
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.
> 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.
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.
Instead of being versed in soil strata classifications and tool markings I suspect the archeologist of the 22nd century will be taught old compression systems and methods of connecting IDE cables to quantum machines.
That's raw information. We do not know about past centuries because we had access to letters written by common people - while that helps it doesn't give context. That's where books come in. Author take the everyday noise, find meaningful patters and add context and explain away why things are the way they are. These books are what will guide our future generation on our way of life.
Except diaries and letters are Considered some of the best and most useful artifacts, as they give an insight into the on the ground thinking, and minute details of life in the past.
These books are becoming more and more "electronic-only." A quick survey of my coworkers shows that I'm the only one who still reads paper books. I hope I am wrong.
It is still better than the word-of-mouth of most of our ancestors. Our actual computer equipment will be fossilized quite well in landfills, hopefully.
Nothing. There won't be anyone around. Whatever the Great Filter is, it'll have gotten us by then. Do civilizations annihilate themselves in nuclear war? Do they use bioweapons they can't control? Do they wreck their ecosystems? Do that transcend into matrioshka brains? Whatever it is, it's something. If there are sentient creatures 58,000 years from now, they won't look or think anything like us, even if they are, technically, our descendants.
58.000 years is nothing. They will be exactly in the same position regarding all arguments about aliens. We (like all others) are not the special generation.
Makes me wonder what research they'll be doing about us in 58,000 years.
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.
You probably haven't seen the artificial womb. Or the onset of machines that recognize patterns and make heuristic decisions. Or the demise of government for the people. Or the rockets that come back from space and land themselves. Or the advent of portable, personalized spying devices carried in the _billions_ by the _willing_.
Sometimes I wonder if this age is _too_ interesting.
Sadly, though, a lot of our waste material won't degrade for thousands of years or more, unlike the natural materials our forebears used. Regardless of how boring we might be, our artifacts will survive longer.
There's a difference between s#%*posting (frowned upon) and irony made with the potential to spawn thoughtful discussion. In this case, the joke is a sarcastic way of asking "does the thesis generalize to modern knowledge work?"
So please don't post comments pretending to know the intent of someone else's post.
And to be fair, I am likely going to be working on some new software projects that I wouldn't work on in the office, where I will be interrupted constantly when I'm not in meetings.
It’s probably your tendency to produce flint knapped tools rather than code though, or your constant fire starting. “Damn it Thag! HR on back! You code, computer, no flint! No fire!”
Just watch, Thag creates an obsidian package manager that anyone can upload their arrowheads to - this will truly disrupt the neolithic hunter ecosystem and break the walled gardens of the gatherers.
Dear Sir/Madam, we at Onk NeoL Patent Tech take much pride in our inventions and patents. We recently came across one of your products, BLUNT ARROWHEAD, which we think violates our patent #5, registered with Neolithic Patent Office. Please send one goat to license our patent, else we will send our grizzly bear.
Best Regards, Onk - CEO Onk NeoL Patent Tech.
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.