I just got done reading Seven Eyes by Stephenson. Pretty good read if you like his style.
——SPOILERS——
——SPOILERS——
——SPOILERS——
Ok - one of the interesting things to me was the level of knowledge of day to day of the folks in the “epic” phase of the book. The theory is that at modern levels and beyond digital storage is very durable when proper precautions are taken. The knowledge that the survivors have about what the originators said, did, texted, Spacebooked, etc was almost offputting at first especially considering the time elapsed.
But then as I thought about it, it started to make sense. People like to record their lives. Storage is durable, and just getting more so (look at the SD cards recovered from crashes) as time goes on. Not only that, if you are in a survival situation, you are going to work hard to make sure that the survivors have a good record of what you went through. Stashing some durable storage devices in a radiation proof safe every few days seems like a simple task.
This is going to radically change archeological methods. You are going to need to bring an expert in old data formats, and either the methods to construct adapters or about a million different dongles.
You are also going to get details that we cannot imagine today. Video, Audio, Text... and tons of it. You will need data scientists to sift thru the morass of selfies and pictures of dinner plates to find the really important stuff.
Anyways, just some (topical?) random thoughts...
Sent from my iPad
Archeology is a great plot hook for me. In fact, when World of Warcraft came out with archeological content, I started playing for a bit. So that tells you how much I would love to get a degree in it.
But anyways, Traveller, and the OTU Show how much archeological opportunity was missed by Marc and the other writers- just look at how much of the history is recorded, with only the Ancients remaining mysterious.
I mean, we don’t see trade in First Imperium artifacts very much, or digs focused on uncovering day to day survival during the Long Night. I mean, look at the records gap between the fall of the Roman Empire and the early 11th century (even church records are a bit spotty), then multiply that by thousands of world multiplied by thousands of little details that never got recorded.
But this is why IMTU there were tons of semi-mysterious past empires and archeology is actually one of the main sources of scientific knowledge.
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=g8EYmpjfNu22Uwq2slNgbtlSYHMIUXYZ