What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives?

Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.

Maybe humans of this age should be curating some etching on stone or even more durable materials, to record some of our history for posterity?

▲

wl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.

	▲	tourmalinetaco a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		That’s not really an “odd” situation, though. That’s kind of just how it goes. The culturally important texts like the Bible get copied and spread, but who cares about the government’s documentation? Literally no one, unfortunately. Preservation within the historical record is in large part a mix of media used and popularity; a popular text can afford to be written on less durable materials, but using those less durable materials for unpopular documents? And they’ll be lost over time.

▲

jopsen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.

▲

un-diletante an hour ago | parent [-]

I wonder if Claude will descend into hell to rescue the poor souls of those who died before it's coming, patiently awaiting digitization in the bosom of Turing.

	▲	vegnus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		i have a mouth and am screaming

▲

rantallion 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

▲

b112 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing.

▲

IAmBroom an hour ago | parent [-]

The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum).

So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.

	▲	b112 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		https://blog.hagerman.com/written-in-stone-m-disc-technology...

▲

toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physic...