et's

dowie · 22 May 2018 at 12:55

Sliver said:
Well that's your problem. I disagree. Deal with it.

I disagree with your disagreement and also offer no basis for discussion but just this curt and unhelpful post.

DampDog · 22 May 2018 at 13:19

mrk said:
They won't

The difference between now and a million years ahead is that we are in a technological revolution and everything is digitised and will remain so forever more. Back then all they had to go by were ancient texts written by man and many things had yet to be discovered or common principles established and accepted.

All intelligent life on (or from) Earth will know what Humans used to be like in history.

Not sure I completely go with that view either. Just because we can digitise information on pretty much anything there is no guarantee that information will be deemed important enough to keep. I suspect if we looked back from say 2000 years into the future, all we would see, would be the broad strokes and significant achievements, much as we see when we look back. Plus some information may not even be accessible. Who here knows all the information and subtleties to build a CPU from scratch? We look back and say "but they couldn't record the information because they only had parchments and ink." There is no saying that someone looking back form a couple of thousand years from now may say the same? There is already talk of quantum and DNA based storage and computing. If technology continues to evolve at the rate it has over the past 100 years of so, much of the technology may be beyond our ability to understand in today's terms.

4K8KW10 · 22 May 2018 at 20:31

DampDog said:
Not sure I completely go with that view either. Just because we can digitise information on pretty much anything there is no guarantee that information will be deemed important enough to keep. I suspect if we looked back from say 2000 years into the future, all we would see, would be the broad strokes and significant achievements, much as we see when we look back. Plus some information may not even be accessible. Who here knows all the information and subtleties to build a CPU from scratch? We look back and say "but they couldn't record the information because they only had parchments and ink." There is no saying that someone looking back form a couple of thousand years from now may say the same? There is already talk of quantum and DNA based storage and computing. If technology continues to evolve at the rate it has over the past 100 years of so, much of the technology may be beyond our ability to understand in today's terms.

Who will decide whether the information is important to be kept? The Pope? The richest people?
It happened in the past, The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by the Roman empire, Julius Caesar and Pope Theophilus of Alexandria.
Only God knows how many papyrus scrolls and containing what precious information there had been.

But, today, the clouds have so many hard drives which contain our data, that I think only a catastrophe of global scale can destroy them all.
Also, we have very large cities which is also very difficult to be wiped out.
Our digitised information will survive, I think.

DampDog · 23 May 2018 at 09:11

4K8KW10 said:
Who will decide whether the information is important to be kept? The Pope? The richest people?
It happened in the past, The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by the Roman empire, Julius Caesar and Pope Theophilus of Alexandria.
Only God knows how many papyrus scrolls and containing what precious information there had been.

But, today, the clouds have so many hard drives which contain our data, that I think only a catastrophe of global scale can destroy them all.
Also, we have very large cities which is also very difficult to be wiped out.
Our digitised information will survive, I think.

I wasn't thinking along the lines of who might want to choose which information is and isn't kept. Though you're spot on, if you look back through history "destroying other peoples stuff" has always been popular, whether it's been books, art, architecture or the greater population.

More that I suspect that lots of information is simply discarded because it's not deemed as being important or relevant any more. I think I read a while back that NASA were struggling to find programmers who still had a working knowledge of FORTRAN. Information disappears not because folk may actively seek to delete it, but because it just seems outdated and no longer important. Who is to say that one of those little nuggets of information that is deleted may be viewed as a pivotal moment at some point in the future? Who's know's?

Anyway aren't we supposed to be talking about "ET's?"

Rroff · 27 May 2018 at 20:06

DampDog said:
I think I read a while back that NASA were struggling to find programmers who still had a working knowledge of FORTRAN.

Ah I used to be pretty good with COBOL 85 and FORTRAN but its over 20 years since I've really even given them a thought would take awhile to get upto speed again.