this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Why?
Unlike in history, we don't really lose information anymore. Not trivia about a massively popular fiction like that anyway.
For instance, Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey, is still well known. He lived almost 3000 years ago. He was known by the ancient Norse as well, so it's not like it's one of those things that was lost to history and discovered in the modern age.
But... I guess you might be trying to make a point that maybe by that point there are real light sabers and perhaps even have been for centuries. It'd make it sort of like the origins of the modern taser, which are also in sort of in scifi. Sort of. Loosely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser#History
We've developed an unfortunate habit of locking it behind paywalls, though.
Which evolves arm in arm with piracy, luckily.
I haven't watched ads or paid for content in like 15 years. Well, most of the time. I do frequent the movies and that at least is paying for content and there's no way to adblock the silver screen.
What do they mean I can't pay in qubluds?!? What else would I pay with?
We’ve already lost a ton of media from 30+ years ago due to lack of preservation and obsolete formats. Are there going to be VHS players in 50 years? DVD drives? Ways to play video formats that are now common? How about the impact of streaming and lack of physical media? What about in 300 years? Is such technology guaranteed to survive potential cataclysmic wars?
There are books
Yeah, ton of obsolete media. If there's lack of preservation, there's probably a reason for it.
I daresay there's enough copies of Star Wars that they'll found on hard drives for the unforeseeable future, and even if they weren't, the story isn't lost.
I'm sure all the original copies of the Odyssey have long since perished, but I still heard about Odysseus and the Trojan War growing up.
Literally the entire world is aware of Star Wars, more or less.
I wonder if this thought was also articulated by librarians at Alexandria.
They might have, and despite being more than a thousand years from the printing press, they would've been more or less right.
It's a myth that the Library of Alexandria was the only collection and all sorts of information was lost. Sure, there were a lot of books that probably didn't have many, if any, other copies. But for the most part, most of the books in that library had copies in other similar (if not [all] as grand) libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Historical_background
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Decline
Yeah.
We still know where the Trojan Horse is from, despite literally thousands of years of culture, stories, translations and a complete lack of printing technology. I also know what the context is for a burning bush.
With our far superior technology, literally global popularity of Star Wars and the fact that we haven't lost stories of even much smaller scale from much earlier on, how would we ever lose the context of what a lightsaber is?
It would require pretty much the complete destruction of all media and the extinction of most people and if even one of the survivors was even slightly predisposed being a writer...
The amount of junk polluting the internet is growing exponentially. I won't be surprised if future historians have trouble separating the truth from fiction, shit posts and LLM craps.
Which keeps better, paper or a hard drive? Exposed to the elements, that is. A literal metal disc or a collection of paper fibers?
The sheer amount of copies of Star Wars in all it's forms is mind-boggling, and again, literally global. We also have people and institutions dedicated to archiving significant things.
There are very few imaginable situations which would lead to humanity losing the concept of what a light saber is.
Like please, propose one.
You're seriously suggesting cultures 3000 years ago preserved information better than we do? Seriously?
Simply untrue.
Can you read data off a floppy disk today? How many others can? How many in fifty years can? The point is that left alone our physical media of today is not compatible in the future because you need specialty tools to read it.
Anyone can pickup and read a piece of paper or a rock with carvings in it. The point is that not only does the media need to survive, but the means to make use of it needs to survive as well.
That is the key issue with technology today. Someone needs to keep loving the data from floppy to zip drive to thumb drive to hard drive to whatever is next or it's lost.
Why on Earth would we lose the ability to read simple magnetic storage?
Yes, I can read data off floppy disk today due to having a floppy drive somewhere in my storage. And even if I didn't, it'd cost like at most 50 euros to get even a new reader. Get one off Amazon for 20 bucks.
It's rather trivial. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_storage
And what data exactly are there on floppy disks that isn't on other media? Like... globally culturally significant data.
Can you read ancient Greek? I can't, but I still know about the Trojan Horse. I can't read Biblical Hebrew, but I know about the ten commandments. How?
It's not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.
For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer's existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, "he" probably didn't write both poems. It's far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.
We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc...) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the "original" trilogy, but there's no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.
I never said Homer authored the stories he wrote.
It's a collection yes, much like the national epic of my country, Finland. Those epics are still considered to be written by the person who actually... wrote them.
It doesn't matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we've not lost the context of the story.
In your argument, it's more like a 1000 years from now people would consider George Lucas to be the creator of the Mandalorian. It wouldn't be correct, but it wouldn't be too far off the mark, and most importantly, nothing important to the context of "what is a light saber" would have been lost.
The point is that writing hadn't even existed too long by the point that we managed to preserve stories to last until modern times.
Our current technology is undeniably far superior, and there are dedicated institutions and people who preserve important information, especially culture. Star Wars is undeniably a part of that.
There is pretty much no situation in which we'd lose the context of what a light saber is, except pretty much the destruction of the entire world, all media wiped out somehow (despite that meaning the destruction of literal nuclear bunkers) and the extinction of anyone who knows about Star Wars.
The scale of destruction would need to be such that humanity itself wouldn't survive it.
It's more than likely that Star Wars will outlive our species.
We literally did. We don't know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don't know when, only rough estimates.
For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.
If our civilization falls, there's no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.
We literally didn't.
The information that existed 3000 years ago is more or less the same as it was, except ours is better, because we have tve concepts of fact and fiction, and we know the Trojan Horse was a mythical wooden horse in a real historical war.
If you watched Band of Brothers 1000 years from now. They will still know that WWII was an actual war and that Band of Brothers was a dramatisation that was produced decades later. The difference would be that you'd also have access to the imdb from which you can read it's history.
Just like the Odyssey was written years after the Trojan War. Back then myths and reality weren't as distinct as they are today. That's why we still tell kids stories about humanlike animals acting this way or that. It's not that it's "not real", just because humanlike animals are fictional, as it still teaches real life lessons.
Just like the Trojan Horse might be symbolic for the Greeks outwitting Trojans.
Sure, yeah, people "see" a lightsaber... where? A toy? In the movie? So they've lost the understanding of what toys and movies are? I would really like to hear a short synopsis of the scenario in which you think this is plausible.