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When Our Digital World Fades, Will We Too?
Anthropologists and archeologists who explore humanity’s past are re-writing much of what we believed to be true about how humans evolved and lived. Advances in genetics and other sciences are helping us to understand our history better than ever before. It is wonderful.
But a few thousand years from now, perhaps just several hundred, our current Digital Age, if we might call it thus, may leave a yawning gap that has historians, anthropologists and archeologists wondering what happened.
It remains as expensive and toilsome today to carve words into stone as it did thousands of years ago. It costs nothing to smile into a camera and record a song on our phones. Whatever we do with these technologies, they are wafting, wanless and ephemeral. They are lost to time the moment we hit send or publish.
They might surmise that we entered an era where we stopped writing, reading, perhaps creating much of anything aside from colossal cities, should they dig them up. Some clues may well be found that we did indeed, have literature and art. They will only be mere glances of how we lived, what we loved, learned and sought.
There will be words on pages, here and there. As treasured in several hundred or several thousand years as the Dead Sea Scrolls of today. Ancient scrolls that we are using Artificial…
