Cultures usually last hundreds of years.Physical artifacts are much more reliable ways to affect people 10,000 years from now.
This seems simply wrong. Identifiable cultures last hundreds of years, but cultural impact on successive cultures can easily be thousands. Can you point to any physical artifact from even a few thousand years ago that has any relevance today? I can see the argument that technologies have impact, but I argue that’s mostly cultural impact.
And it’s not clear that either culture OR artifacts have predictable or useful effects 10K years out.
Nod. (Epistemic status of this post was more ‘brainstorming/writeup’ than anything definitive)
But, the idea was something like:
my vague impression is that cultural fidelity is lost after a few hundred years, except in a few cases where the culture heavily optimized for fidelity.
cultures do have longer term impacts through flow-through-effects, but those are much harder to control
there are probably not many 3000+ year artifacts that are directly influencing the present day. But the two central examples I have in mind are:
the pyramids / stonehenge / other megalithic artifacts clearly last, pretty robustly, even if they don’t have much influence.
i.e. we know very little about whatever culture built stonehenge, but we know they built stonehenge.
books continue to have a fair amount of influence, in ways that can continue despite culture. (I’m not sure what exactly I think of the Protestant Reformation in terms of whether it’s actually ‘truer’ to the spirit of the Bible than Catholic dogma. But, my impression is that Martin Luther at least claimed influence from being able to read the exact text himself, and it suggests that if you wrote a book that was directly optimized for being re-derivable about how to interpret, you could create a cultural artifact that was robust against political forces manipulating it)
The Long Now project that seems most directly agenty in this respect is the Rosetta Project and their “what library would you want to restart civilization” project, both of which involve figuring out ways to archive things that will robustly last and be rederivable by earlier-stage civilizations.
This seems simply wrong. Identifiable cultures last hundreds of years, but cultural impact on successive cultures can easily be thousands. Can you point to any physical artifact from even a few thousand years ago that has any relevance today? I can see the argument that technologies have impact, but I argue that’s mostly cultural impact.
And it’s not clear that either culture OR artifacts have predictable or useful effects 10K years out.
Nod. (Epistemic status of this post was more ‘brainstorming/writeup’ than anything definitive)
But, the idea was something like:
my vague impression is that cultural fidelity is lost after a few hundred years, except in a few cases where the culture heavily optimized for fidelity.
cultures do have longer term impacts through flow-through-effects, but those are much harder to control
there are probably not many 3000+ year artifacts that are directly influencing the present day. But the two central examples I have in mind are:
the pyramids / stonehenge / other megalithic artifacts clearly last, pretty robustly, even if they don’t have much influence.
i.e. we know very little about whatever culture built stonehenge, but we know they built stonehenge.
books continue to have a fair amount of influence, in ways that can continue despite culture. (I’m not sure what exactly I think of the Protestant Reformation in terms of whether it’s actually ‘truer’ to the spirit of the Bible than Catholic dogma. But, my impression is that Martin Luther at least claimed influence from being able to read the exact text himself, and it suggests that if you wrote a book that was directly optimized for being re-derivable about how to interpret, you could create a cultural artifact that was robust against political forces manipulating it)
The Long Now project that seems most directly agenty in this respect is the Rosetta Project and their “what library would you want to restart civilization” project, both of which involve figuring out ways to archive things that will robustly last and be rederivable by earlier-stage civilizations.