I just got a rather grim reminder tonight of how important historic preservation is. For some reason, I wondered how many Roman chariots had survived to the modern day. There were a million people living in the capital of Rome at its peak as an empire. I don't know the population of the empire, as a whole at that time, but if you figure that there was one chariot for every 4 people in Rome, that works out to 250K chariots, just in the capital. Do you want to take a guess on how many still survive? Almost none. There are, apparently, about 300 ancient chariots from various civilizations around the world. Six of them are intact enough to be considered complete. Rome, as we commonly think about it (Yeah, I know, the Eastern Empire survived until the Crusades, you know what I mean, nerd.) lasted for ~1000 years, half as a Republic, half as an empire. I realize it fell about 1500 years ago, but it's pretty bleak that almost none of Rome's ancient chariots survive. I would hope that 1500 years from now folks had more cars from the 20th Century to look at than just say, six. Because odds are, they'd either be a VW Beetle or a Model T. Nothing wrong with them, of course, they're excellent engineering examples of what an automobile as basic transportation should be. I think that we can also agree that other samples that showed how lovely an automobile can be, deserve to be preserved. I mean, say we lived in an incredible future 1,500 years from now, where anything you can imagine can be built, but we'd lost the bulk of our knowledge about things created in the 20th and 21st Centuries. I mean, do you really want to have a person (or alien, or computer, or whatever) designing anything if they have no idea of what a Coffin-Nose Cord, or a Loewy locomotive, or any of a large number things created in that time period look like. I mean, sure, they could probably make something that looked nice, but just like those ancient manuscripts where you see an illustration of an animal like a cat, dog, horse, or what you'd think someone back then would know about, but clearly they don't. The artwork's nice and all, but if you don't know what those animals look like, how are you going to design something with sleek lines?
I think they're going to invent photonic time travel someday. You can't hop in, but you can watch. I mean, if you transwarped out 700 light years, and aimed a giant telescope back at Earth, you'd see 700 years ago, right? So, there must be some trick with entanglement you can do to see that stuff without the spaceship trip. Combine that with 3-D printing, we can get back all the chariots, and clothing, and all that stuff.
It already exists. Light can be bent by gravitational lensing. In the cosmic pool game some of the light that left earth will be lensed back after travelling for many years.
In the book version of "Battlefield Earth" they do something like that to figure out what happened to the Psychlos. (I should point out that while the movie is fucking stupid, the book is a fun little romp. The first paragraph makes it clear that the Psychlos are basically Pakleds that conquered 20th Century Earth. It's obviously an allegorical tale about Scientology, but what makes the movie so hysterical is that Travolta said while promoting it that he "doesn't understand science fiction at all.")
One thing to consider is the materials used in the past degraded rapidly. So many parts were made of wood or leather or something else that is biodegradable, and the stone and metals were valuable enough to be used in other projects. The Great Pyramids were once covered in white limestone, which was all peeled off and reused or metals could be recycled when getting new metal was difficult or expensive. We don't have that problem with so many composite and manmade materials these days. I agree, you aren't likely to find a K-Car in a museum a thousand years from now, but some Corvette might be in one, just because academics of the future will understand what it was based when they go through books and photos. Likewise, we have a pharaoh's chariot in a museum, but some farmer's oxcart from the same period isn't going to be nearly as exciting even if it did survive.
Under the right conditions, though, wood and leather can last tens of thousands of years, or more. Additionally, while I don't think that Rome had anything that could qualify as an archeologist, the ancient Egyptians certainly did. So, at times, they made an active effort to uncover and preserve their history. In the early days of the war, Ukraine was dragging out 100-year-old weapons from museums and deploying them. Perfectly understandable, of course, but it shows the kind of desperation that forces people to raid historic collections for materials. That has to have been the experience of other societies over millennia. Shit's bad, and while you know the thing is important, if you don't grab it and use it, there may not be anyone around to remember what was lost. We talk about how plastic lasts forever, but think about how many of the things that are important to us right now, that aren't likely to last as long. It would be fantastic if WWII was the last massive global conflict our species ever sees, and that our efforts to preserve the history of what happened during that time played a part in it. Let's say an asteroid, just big enough to really fuck things up, but not definitively put us onto a path to extinction. Still, shit's bad, billions of people wiped out, and the rest pushed back technologically by centuries. For a good chunk of the population, survival can be an iffy business. Can't really blame them for cannibalizing anything and everything they can get their hands on that might help them survive. Still, if we lose enough of the history around WWII, we risk seeing something like it happen again, if civilization is able to reach just some of the previous technological heights it once had. And that, really fucking sucks.
