I wonder what people 2000 years in the future would think if they stumbled upon the remains of my trinket collection? Would they recognise that its a collection of things I found pretty, or would it be interpreted as a sorcerer's kit? Probably not if they had an understanding of our time period, but it's fun to imagine.
There’s a fun 1970s book “Motel of the Mysteries” by the brilliant illustrator David Macaulay with this basic premise.
A single motel room is discovered underground by future archeologists, who proceed to interpret everything as if entering Tutankhamen’s tomb. The dusty motel room and its “treasures” are illustrated with the same precision that Macaulay brought to his classic works like “City” and “Pyramid” (which this 80s child remembers fondly enough that I bought them used for my kids a few years back, along with “Motel”.)
Holy moly, that’s a blast from the past! I had borrowed this book from my schools library so many times my name was the only one on the borrowing card at the back!
A similar premise underlies the amazing "Book of Dave" by Will Self. The book has two parallel time streams, one involving a London taxi driver in the present day and then one in the far future in which some writings of his have become the basis for a Taliban-like extremist religious society.
It's an incredible book in particular if you know London and have been in a black cab and heard the sorts of banter London taxi drivers use, because in the "future" section everyone speaks in a corrupt English dialect based on this. You can also spot various London landmarks in the post-apocalyptic setting (eg the Centerpoint building).
I wonder as well. I've really enjoyed reading about all of the findings that have come out of Pompeii and Herculaneum in recent years: the graffiti[0], the fast food joint that looks like it could be a Chipotle or a Subway[1], and articles like this. It all feels pretty _recent_, even though it was 2000 years ago.
I think that people 2000 years from now will have a lot more information about our time to go on, though. We disseminate and preserve information at a scale that did not exist back then. The sole surviving written record of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption -- and perhaps the earliest written record of any volcanic eruption -- comes from two letters written by Pliny the Younger.[2] Today, news of the event would be spread near-instantaneously (and presumably preserved in multiple locations), like news of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Back then, there was just the dissemination of paper(-like) copies.
In a lot of ways roman civilization fits much better into “nearly industrialized” than “millennia old” and you have to remember that a whole lot of what became western civilization was invented by romans.
Really there were only a few missing big ideas and a few organizational failures in the way of, say, someone landing on the moon a thousand years ago. The fall of the empire set the species back perhaps as much as 1500 years.
i fear a lot of our data will be lost, in particular digital data. it's already getting difficult to access data in formats/form-factors from within a single lifetime. from the decay of the magnetization to the details of encoding.
If you think decay of magnetization is the limiting factor to digital longevity, I'm sorry to report that intentional bitrot will destroy any hope of retrieval long before the spinning platters fail. I'd suggest an experiment: Think of some major news event you can remember from even 10 years ago, find a news story about it online, and then just follow the links contained therein. Not only is Google shaping what you can see, but so is everyone else. God bless the Internet Archive.
> Even if 99.9% is lost, that still leaves behind far more than we have about the Romans.
Indeed, and due to complex historical factors, we have much more Roman writing than we have writing from other civilizations. It's important to remember that there are entire swathes of history and entire regions from where we have no actual history, only circumstantial writing by other peoples such as trading partners.
A lot of that information will be lost it costs a lot of money to store data on the internet nowadays when nobody's paying the bill it just gets lost.
We bought an old tobacco farm in South Indiana almost every building it has these weird metal rings. historians said they were for tying up cattle and horses. But we found out recently that they were actually for farming equipment they would tether steam engines to ropes and then use these steel rings attached to buildings and trees to pull plows around with the steam engines.
"It seems this person had some kind of unusual attachment to different sorts of computer peripheral cables. In the remains of his house we found computer cables spanning at least 40 years worth of technology. Clearly he spent his life worrying about whether or not he might in future need to connect up peripherals that went to their grave decades before him."
I have no idea what historians would say about my tungsten cube, clump of silicon carbide, triangular prism, stainless steel fidget spinner, and hexastix made of pencils.
My cube is actually a high tungsten carbide. I do happen to have a 1kg elemental tungsten cylinder though. I like to imagine dropping it from space on things that would be greatly improved by becoming a crater.
At some point I’d like to obtain matching gold and uranium cylinders.
At my university we had access to lead bricks (roughly 5x10x20 cm) used for radiation shielding at a small accelerator. One Friday evening it became at great idea to take one of those to the seventh floor and let it fall onto the lawn below.
One of the most underwhelming experiences ever: there was hardly any indentation in the moist soil. Bullets go really fast.
(I realize you said "drop from space" which would be a completely different matter of course, so I suspect you have realized this without experiments.)
I happened to be in a mayor’s jewelry store about 12 years ago when I saw someone walk in and purchase a gold paper clip for about $300 (want to say it was designer too, maybe Cartier).
Never forget he looked raggedy as hell, he was wearing crocks, an inside out polo shirt with stains and some fishing shorts...when he took out his wallet it was held together by a rubber band, it was awesome.
We can compare the view of expensive luxury stores in Pretty Woman (Julia Roberts attempts to walk into a top-end store and is summarily ejected by snotty staff) with the one in Breakfast at Tiffany's (staff are excruciatingly polite and bend over backwards to accommodate ridiculous requests from a guy who has already made it clear he doesn't have any money).
People imagine the first mode, but the second one is much closer to reality.
Well this was Miami, many jewelry stores you can’t even walk into but need to be buzzed in and I have seen on more than one occasion people not let in.
This wasn’t one of those stores, but staff was more than accommodating, before purchasing the paper clip he made a rather odd request - he wanted to see the largest diamond in the store, they actually brought it out from the back (it wasn’t even in a display case). Maybe that is something the Uber rich do when they walk into a jewelry store to test service or quality of the merchandise or both.
It is people who are pretending to be or aspire to be rich who get snooty about appearances far more than people who are or actually cater to the wealthy.
For the particular example, I'd think the scene in Pretty Woman is there purely for a particular storytelling reason -- the point is to illustrate how, if you suddenly become powerful, you can use that power to hurt people who were mean to you when you were small. So there's a scene where some people are abusive to Julia Roberts because the writer wants them to be, rather than for any in-world reason, so that she can come back later and take revenge.
In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Tiffany's represents how Audrey Hepburn thinks about the world of the rich, and is shown in a more positive light.
I mean, there are lots of ways to fake gold. At least one of these has some gold on the outside - which isn't going to simply wash off in the bathtub. And I'm guessing there are ways to make sure it sinks in water, as cheap and mid-grade jewelry tends to sink to the bottom too.
Yes, but that trick doesn't work so good when you use tungsten to fake gold, because they allmost got the same density. Thats also probably why the tungsten price recently went up together with the gold price, despite no significant increase in industrial demand for tungsten. Because thats how gold bars gets faked today.
It was a bit of a joke as you can use water displacement and weight to determine density.
If you’re buying a brick of gold you buy it from someone licensed to sell it (you usually have to be) and the regulations and verifications involved are pretty trustworthy.
Is that something you generally miss in your life, "really dense stuff"? Seems unlikely someone would justify "one of the best purchases I ever made" with "it's really dense".
Or maybe I just don't see how something really dense could be useful except if you need something heavy but don't have a lot of space available.
You can make very awesome things out tungsten or tungsten carbide. I think, I would like to have a cube as well, to be inspired by the potential of it ...
Ok, I was now about to order one, where I found this Amazon recension, which I just have to share:
Richard Behiel
This Cube Cured my Mortality
"All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality. "
That depends on the room. Robert Anton Wilson was generally respected, as was William Burroughs. You could add Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Isaac Newton to the list.
And before anybody had come up with all of these bits about how to use formalized experimentation and reason to arrive at truth? You had people doing things based on intuition and whatever means of gaining and transmitting knowledge that there was at the time...
“sorcery” is more of a modern pejorative for practices which haven’t or couldn’t be verified with modern methods... before modern methods you had people doing what they could to accomplish things... it wouldn’t occur to you to distinguish (and you couldn’t) between “magic” nonsense and “real” medicine. You got treated with plants and concoctions that had at least some basis in reason and experience, but there weren’t yet philosophies about how to reliably separate what was real and what worked from what was bogus.
Modern medicine still has plenty of nonsense in it which might as well be sorcery.
It seems as if you're trying to argue that science is mostly sorcery and sorcery is mostly science - but all you're really saying is that science and sorcery can coexist, and that one can be confused for the other. This is obviously true, but that doesn't make them the same.
"Sorcery" isn't a pejorative, any more than or "witchcraft" or "religious ritual." You could say that the ancient Assyrian magi from whom we get the word "magic" were doing a form of science when they kept track of the movements of the stars and the sun and moon, but when they used that knowledge to attempt to predict the future, they were doing sorcery.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I was a fan of MacGyver as a kid so I'd collect any trinket I could find. Instead of penises there would be cannabis leafs, political buttons and band parapharnelia.
Clearly this was a powerful sorcerer.
If found in a rich estate it might have been an unusual perk of wealthy children to collect these trinkets in their wooden boxes, just like children of the 90s did.
I read once that any object found that resembles things you may find at an adult store today gets labeled as "fertility ritual usage" to appear more academic
It is a bit of a problem with archeology which is also recognized by archaeologists.
That and how the whole story of hundreds of years of civilization is sometimes just an embellished projection based on a handful of symbols scratched in stone somewhere.
Similar, I've wondered what pieces of popular fiction, if they were the only portion of modern material dug up by a future civilization, would be assumed to be religious texts.
At one time this was taken quite seriously, and it's still an important historical source given how little is available on some of the time periods it covers, but it's unclear what it was _supposed to be_. It clearly wasn't intended as a historical text.
People also forget how important fertility was. Many children died young or at birth, and the mother was in danger too. Raising children to adulthood was good fortune and a way to prosperity. Divination and magic are ways to influence that in that kind of context.
