Clearly we don't capture or archive much of what's produced now, but that's not a new thing. There are very few records of things from more than a couple of hundred years ago. If you want to see anything that isn't the official government's (or monarch's) line there's much, much less.

If you ignore digital media, and compare the number of physical books produced, there are many thousands of times more produced now than there were 500 years ago.

You're right in the sense that a lot will be lost, and that we should strive to do better, but in terms of comparison to the past we're preserving an exceptional amount of knowledge.

>This era will be a black hole in history.

What is this era exactly? Digitization is the last stage for human information keeping. Stone, papyrus, paper, gramophone discs, photographic film, cassette tape, film strips, newsprint, etc are just temporary stop-gap measures to get here. This is the new norm, forever. We better learn how to better deal with this stuff. We're not exactly going to back to spreading feces on cave walls here.

I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.

That said, I wonder if history had similar debates on moving from stone to papyrus or other formats. Papyrus is delicate and burns but its so much more convenient to carry and write on. I wonder if media format anxiety is as old as civilization itself.

>I imagine WWIII would knock us back to the stone age, as they say, but between fallout, radiation, and nuclear winter there will be no next era for humankind as humanity simply won't survive it. This technological train we're riding doesn't stop. It can only crash, so lets learn how to better drive it then.

That's not going to happen. We might as well get used to the idea that we're simply not going to exist as a civilization and probably not as a species in a few centuries, or probably less. So we should we working to document our civilization for the benefit of interstellar explorers who might happen upon the ruins of our civilization, so they can understand what happened, and what things were like before we destroyed ourselves. For this, we should be putting archives on the Moon and other worlds in the solar system, and a few on interstellar probes like the stuff we put on the Voyager probes.

Does humanity care about letting aliens know we once lived here long after we are gone? I doubt it. Without that political will, this expensive space graffiti will never happen.

Does "humanity"? I don't know. There's no way to know that without a poll.

Personally, I do. I think it's a worthy project. It would have been really nice if people in other ancient civilizations (Rome, Hittite Empire, etc.) had left us complete and detailed historical records safely locked away so that we could understand their civilizations and lives instead of trying to piece together a fragmented understanding from various ruins and relics that we've managed to dig up.

Is there political will? Obviously not. If there were, there'd be political will to fix our problems, but that doesn't exist either, so we're doomed to destruction of our civilization.

And a well-protected (and probably hidden, to keep random meteor impacts from wiping it out) cache of archives hardly amounts to "graffiti".

Civilization is fragile. We have the technology to make total war a suicide mission. But we have the hubris to destroy society from within.

A black hole relative to when? We're missing the other six parts of the Iliad epic. The play which beat Oedipus Rex at a Grecian theater festival has been lost forever. Incredibly minuscule amounts of recorded history have been preserved until recently.

You can access the public and private papers of most US Presidents, for example. We have letters from US Civil War soldiers and immigrants that are important primary sources.

My wife worked for a municipal water utility which possesses very old (early 19th century) records that shed light into how certain developments in the city's history progressed. Today that equivalent information is all electronic and most will be inaccessible in a decade or less.

Getting insight into how people thought in the past will be harder for this era. Letters are replaced by electronic communication that is difficult to save and store casually. Things like annual reports are electronic only.

Lost Greek works weren't lost because they weren't recorded. They were destroyed by the fall of that civilization and the wars and chaos that followed.

So there won't be any wars or fall of civilizations anymore that could destroy even physical work? We are one crazy world leader from everything being bombed into oblivion. I don't think recording things physically is going to preserve anything in that case.

Not a blackhole compared to the rest of history. If anything, the ~100 years before this 'era' of temporary information that quickly disappears was the exception. We're just slowly reverting to how it was before.