Here’s something even sadder. We only need history because human lives are so short.
In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.
Sometimes, when hiking, I’ll see something incredible, and when I go to capture it in a photo, it just doesn’t come out the same.
Those vistas are allllll for me
The photo will never replicate the experience, but you can use it as a cue to go back to that place in your mind!
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it…[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us… The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians…the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians…the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us…as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)
To my knowledge, most of it from antiquity was lost. Whish is what Ibn Khaldun was speaking about, not the scholarship for the Islamic period.
I see it the other way around, we managed to pass on civilization for our children for 90% of the history without writing it down
