
Civilizational Collapse, Part 4 - mathgenius
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilizational-collapse-part-4/
======
ddxxdd
This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage.

Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State
drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that
will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and
intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then
so can any form of digital storage.

On a side note, I enjoy reading John Baez's answers to common physics
questions:
[http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/](http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/)

~~~
ekianjo
> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital
> storage.

There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures
eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate
everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.

~~~
kakwa_
Being able to make copies easily and store them in different location are
probably the best protection for any document. And now days copies are
virtually free and moving them is extremely easy.

I'm wondering if someone as done studies on the last technical revolution of
this kind, aka the printing press. To which extent the printing press helped
prevent the definitive loss of documents? There are probably a tons of factors
to take into account, like history, age, kind of documents, etc, but it could
be quite interesting.

Lastly, as a though experiment, I'm wondering how an archeologist would react
in front of a disk drive in a thousand years. Let say the disk drive is in a
good condition, but the archeologist has to discover everything:

1) First he has to understand that the disk contains binary data spread in a
certain way, if he has equivalent technology or better than today, this should
work. (if he realizes that he should be extremely cautious when opening the
disk drive, at least for spinning rust).

2) Then he could have to understand the logical layout of data on the medium
(aka the FS), this step is kind of optional has you can recover fragment
easily, but it would help a lot. And if data was stored in a DB, it's a second
layer equivalent to the FS.

3) Then you have to understand the file format, if it's directly a simple TXT
file, it should be doable, and it's probable someone can deduce the encoding
used, ASCII is easy, UTF-8 is a bit more complex but doable. But, and it's a
big but, if the data is compressed in anyway, and a lot of formats are these
days, I skeptical that the archeologist (and his technical assistance) would
be able to deduce it's a compressed format and not some random garbage, and
then re-discover the algorithm used. And if it's a more complex document, like
images (even if BMP should be doable), sound and video, it starts to get
really tricky.

4) And then, you need to decipher the language and/or alphabet used.

Basically it feels a lot like Champollion needing to decipher 4 layers of
hieroglyphs before getting the content. Deciphering one can already be hard
enough.

That being said, as source code is often recorded as simple ASCII files which
should be decipherable, he could get lucky and get the code parsing the
layers, or at least get a specification of it.

------
nvahalik
When reading about what Physcon, I reminded me of an interview[0] I recently
listened to with Drs. James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. They bring up some
of these very ideas and how they are encountering them today in our society:
i.e. people who see science and reason as "master's tools" of "oppression".

It seems that everything old is new again.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8](https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8)

~~~
Carioca
As a Brazilian, I see a MUCH larger threat from the current right-wing
government than from lefties inside academia. While the relationship between
natural/hard/exact sciences and social/soft sciences can indeed be very
strained, there's very little interference in the actual content of research.

Meanwhile, the State Assembly of São Paulo formed an Investigative Comittee
that just requested the content of all research produced by the three state
universities in the last 8 years to look for bias under the guise of fiscal
responsibility[1]. The commitee is led by a conservative state congressman who
never attended college.

1:
[https://www.adusp.org.br/index.php/defesauniv/3408-deputada-...](https://www.adusp.org.br/index.php/defesauniv/3408-deputada-
tucana-pede-que-usp-unesp-e-unicamp-apresentem-a-cpi-lista-com-todas-as-
pesquisas-realizadas-nos-ultimos-oito-anos), link in Portuguese

~~~
nvahalik
I don't think either "side" can claim any sort of moral high ground on this
issue. In the case of the video I'm referencing above, the issue is decidedly
from the left which has been trumpeting a post-truth, highly individualized,
no-harm-freedom, and consent-based understanding of personal conduct.

But on the other hand, I think you are right in that there are people who can
and will say _X is unquestionably always true_ by calling out to something
like truth even though it has little to no basis in reality.

~~~
Carioca
I'm going to be honest with you, I won't sit through an hour and a half video
that makes your point for you. I'll just say that the current president fired
the director of the National Institute for Space Research (an MIT PhD) for
saying satellite data indicated deforestation was on the rise, contradicting
the minister of the environment. An Air Force official was temporarily put in
his place. While the official is a PhD, he was found hastily after the also
hasty firing

I think you'll agree that actually dismissing the director of an important
research institution is very much more important than whatever new prank
Boghossian has played on the “identitarian left”

~~~
nvahalik
> I think you'll agree that actually dismissing the director of an important
> research institution is very much more important than whatever new prank
> Boghossian has played on the “identitarian left”

I don't agree. Dismissing this discussion as a "prank" played on the
"identitarian left" is not accurate or does it adequately convey the weight of
the discussion.

So while I do agree what you are saying is troubling, both the "left" and the
"right" are swing their axes at the bottom of the tree of civilization.

~~~
Carioca
My point is that one of them is using a chainsaw, but some people insist on
crying “both sides”

~~~
nvahalik
And I suppose we shall have to agree to disagree on which is which. ;)

------
mtrovo
Maybe a silly question but how well connected was the world during Greek and
Persian civilisations? Shouldn't their ideas and works survive on neighbours
empires that we have a good track record?

I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and
India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations
collapses.

~~~
netsensei
Alexander of Macedonia conquered a vast empire right up to the Indus River.

Then there's the Silk Road who connected the Eurasian continent economic,
cultural and political influence for centuries.

So, the spread of ideas across cultures is pretty much established.

The problem is that the survival of specific historic records across centuries
or millennia is tenuous at best. First hand accounts are extremely rare and
most of what we know about those times was handed down by copying what was
deemed relevant throughout time.

Lesson number one each historian learns is to ask critical questions about the
source material. Who wrote this? What do we know about the contemporary
context? Does other material corroborate with what we are reading now? How
about our own hindsight bias when reading records today? What about other
biases that played out at the time?

Oftentimes, it's not possible to ascertain a theory or a hypothesis, how
things actually went down, simply because we lack the source material. And
just as often we may get caught unaware by our own assumptions that were
handed down to us by teachers, authors, movies, art,...

As such, most historians will tell you that while it's plausible that the
origins of some technologies root back further in time, there's little point
in looking for evidence as there is simply no historic or archaeological
record available. That's where you'll find that a falsifiable theory turns
into mere speculation.

A historical researcher therefore only builds on top of verified sources. Much
like a criminal investigator trying to establish the raw facts that support a
given narrative.

------
chrisco255
This quote: "Ecologically, these Archaic hunters and gatherers had moved one
entire link down the food chain, thereby eliminating the approximately
90-percent loss in food value that occurs when one feeds on an animal that is
a plant-eater."

This is just completely false. All meat consumed is bioavailable protein and
nutrients. Even more so when it's cooked. Plants have reduced bioavailability
due to high oxalate, phytic acid, and lectins.

Humans would have never evolved the ability to eat meat if it didn't confer a
natural advantage over foragers.

~~~
solotronics
Also, animals can digest many forms of plant that are useless as human food
such as plains grasses and tree leaves. Vegetarianism is elitist in that many
people on earth cannot afford to foregoe any availible source of protein and
food, there are starving people already and telling someone in Africa they
shouldn't eat a chicken that forages near their house is pretty narrow minded.
I tend to eat vegetarian on my own but this is only possible because I am
privileged in my income.

~~~
spodek
What does being vegetarian have to do with telling other people what they
should or shouldn't eat?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The old joke: "How can you tell if someone is a Vegetarian? They'll tell you."

~~~
dredmorbius
How can you tell if someone is a meat eater?

They'll complain that you're a vegitarian.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hm. Its pretty different. I don't come to a table and say "Hey! I'm a meat
eater! Better supply me with meat in this meal, or I'm going to walk away!"

Clearly, on one side, we have omnivores. On the other, extra rules about food
type and preparation. Its almost always more complicated to feed one, than the
other.

------
frankbreetz
If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our
technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization
figuring out how to read a hard drive.

~~~
whatshisface
For that to happen our current civilization would have to be defined as every
civilization on Earth.

~~~
cookieswumchorr
there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences
between countries are far less than it would take to define different
civilizations

~~~
ekianjo
> there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences
> between countries are far less than it would take to define different
> civilizations

What is your definition of a civilization then? As far as i know there is no
"global" culture, you can live in many different places and have a totally
different everyday life experience.

~~~
pygy_
Science and technology (and maybe trade?) are our global culture.

~~~
ekianjo
I just said there is no such thing as a global culture. It's not because you
have Starbucks in every big city that the experience of living in different
places is the same.

~~~
pygy_
There are local peculiarities, but we share a common core built around science
an technology. You can learn to drive a car anywhere on earth. You'll learn
the same maths, physics, chemistry and biology. You can use phones everywhere.
That is culture, globally shared.

------
fallingfrog
If our current civilization collapses, I think it’s unlikely that another
similar one would arise- or if it did it would happen much more slowly. There
are no more easily accessible seams of rich ores of any kind in the world; the
deposits remaining require a lot of energy and technology to use since they
are low grade ores and it would be very difficult to get to a high enough
technology level to use them without already having the refined minerals. A
chicken and egg problem.

[https://images.app.goo.gl/5aNH7AWvb3V745ZH6](https://images.app.goo.gl/5aNH7AWvb3V745ZH6)

------
benj111
"When the Romans took over, they dumbed things down"

Without reading the cited book, the case doesn't seem to have been made for
this.

"then we have the first four books by Apollonius on conic sections—the more
elementary ones—but the other three have been lost"

Maybe the 4th volume was just wrong, or an index, or so highly valued it was
separated from the other 3. Or maybe the rich hand side of the bookshelf got
rot.

Is there any more to this?

------
abhishekjha
Isn't spacetime an all time storage system? You can't burn it, chafe it, erode
it. Its is going to be there forever. Even if there's something that you think
has been lost(like the library of Alexandria or the Roman empire) is waiting
to be seen again. It is never lost. These `movies` of spacetime is being saved
on a forever store.

~~~
dredmorbius
Storage requires retrieval, as well as well as an encoding and preserving
mechanism.

Much as users don't want backups, they want restores, authors don't want
books, they want readers.

There's an interesting parallel between _transmissions_ and _recordings_ I'd
noticed some time ago, that doesn't seem to be much commented on in
discussions of information theory, though I'm not sure if it's because it's
obscure or obvious:

A _transmission_ utilises variations in _time_ in a low-noise _channel_ to
deliver _information_ over _space_ to a _receiver_ which _does not_ have to
move or sweep relative to the signal.

A _recording_ utilises variations in _space_ in a low-variance _medium_ to
deliver _information_ through _time_ , to a _reader_ which _must_ move or
sweep relative to the encoding.

Each further relies on encoding, decoding, is subject to noise or
deterioration, and may be subject to context or inference. Probably other
factors as well.

Recordings can, of course, be moved through space (though a single recording
can be in only a given location at a given time). Transmissions _also_ travel
through time at some rate, not exceeding the speed of light.

There are systems which combine transmission and recording (notably
computers). Transmission and recording each play a role in virtually all
message chains. And there may be some forms of encoding (possibly
holographic?) which either combine both methods or utilise others (though I'm
inclined to see holograms as forms of recordings).

"Spacetime" as an all-time storage system, by itself, either doesn't make
sense or is so vague as to be meaningless. Perhaps you could clarify.

Also: there's no inherent conservation law of information. Quite the opposite.

~~~
areyousure
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
hiding_theorem#Conservation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
hiding_theorem#Conservation_of_quantum_information)

~~~
dredmorbius
Practical upshot?

------
sgt101
We would have known about machines like the Antikythera mechanism because the
Romans wrote about them : specifically Cicero documented the existence of
these kinds of machines (that could predict the motion of the planets).

~~~
gwern
The only reason anyone pays any attention to that throwaway line in Cicero is
_because_ the Antikythera mechanism exists. Can you find a single modern
reference to that Cicero passage - pre-Antikythera mechanism - which
interprets it, in full generality, as proving the Greco-Romans had analogue
computing developed to such a high extent?

~~~
sgt101
No! You are right, but isn't that super interesting? Especially given various
other descriptions of automata, and also some of the descriptions of medieval
automata.

------
john_minsk
If something happens in the world able to cause a collapse of our civilization
- the preservation of knowledge will be the least of our problems.

I see little point in trying to solve this issue.

But while we are here - we can make copies of useful knowledge and try to have
them as in tact as possible...

~~~
interfixus
In the land of collapsed technology, an accessible copy of Wikipedia may be a
priceless gem.

------
agumonkey
I couldn't help but reading `Civilizational Collapse – Part IV` .

------
jordanbeiber
On this topic - Oswald Spenglers observations on the topic of civilizational
collapse are an interesting read.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West)

> Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism
> with a limited and predictable lifespan.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Now the superorganism is global. Who will be left to carry the torch?

~~~
platistocrates
Civilizations don't die, they fragment and reform. The analogy of an organism
is being stretched too far.

