1w ago

Any Egyptologists confirm?

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I think its interesting that we are also very biased towards long lasting societies, because they leave more stuff for us to study, and literate ones, because they can tell us with their own words what events there were. We still dont have a complete picture of the battle of Cannae, one of the consequential in all of history, whose effects we are still living with. Writing was only invented 4500ish years ago, and humans are as a species are way way older.
Its fucked up to think about Catal Hayuk, or Utsie.
- It's also interesting how short these time frames actually are. 2000 years are just 80 generations.
  All but the most important bullet points of history from that time is wiped out.
  And our intuitive understanding "how the past was" is just from maybe 4-5 generations ago.
  The past is a vast place and we only ever scratch the very surface of it.
  
  No one even really knows what their great grandparents were like, unless they were famous or something. I have no idea who my great, great grandfather even was. It stops in 1872
  
  Aren't great grandparents the parents of your grandparents? I knew them, and a lot of people did know theirs. Mine were nice people.
  
  What about your great, great grandparents then? Do you know what they were like?
  
  True, depends on the age when everyone got kids. But the point of the person you replied to still stands: You know the people you met, you might know one or the other story of the people they met, but then it stops.
  One of my great grandparents is still alive. They told me a handful of stories from their parents and grandparents. That's it. There's no history beyond a few birth and marriage certificates from beyond that.
  
  And now there is an overwhelming amount of information, as long as someone keeps rotating in fresh hard drives and replacing the dead ones
  
  Kinda, ish, not really though.
  In theory, all that data exists, but huge amounts of it are lost already. There was an indoor pool/waterpark thing that we often went to as kids and it was shut down about 25 years ago.
  I tried finding pictures of that, and the only picture I could find was from when it was torn down. There are no (publically available) fotos of that thing being in operation, and 25 years is not a long time.
  My wife's grandpa died a while ago and I helped going through his PC to sort what to keep. It was a huge mess and we ended up grabbing a few things that looked relevant, put them onto a hard drive and that on a shelf in my wife's parents' house. And it will likely remain there without anyone looking into it until my wife's parents die, and then it will get tossed out too.
  We had long-term shelf-stable data storage for centuries, and still when someone dies we usually throw out their old diaries and photo albums, maybe keeping a handful of pictures. And even if there's a horder in the family who keeps all that, most people end up with dozens or hundreds of descendants over a few generations and one of these descendants ends up with the data. To all others this data is all but lost.
  But it's not only that: the number of ancestors you have grows exponentially with each generation you go back. It's easy to keep 4 grandparents straight in mind. 8 great grand parents are also not that hard. 16 great great grandparents that you have likely never met become more difficult. 32 great great grandparents are a lot, and it only gets worse from here. There's only so much mental capacity a human has, so remembering more than just names and dates for everyone a few generations back is all but impossible.
  So what we will see in the future is just that there will be more data rotting away until it's thrown out. Cloud services are already starting to go back on their "we store stuff until eternity"-policies.

73 comments