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.

I recall an hour-long history program on TV where a whole narrative was concocted out of the engraving of a gladiator's name on a stone.

> 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.

> and due to complex historical factors, we have much more Roman writing than we have writing from other civilizations.

Most other civilizations, yes, but Mesopotamia is beating Rome hands down for availability of writing.

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.