2999

[mistersleepless]

(Originally written for the Millennium section of Fox News Online: "A snap shot of the future: A brief interview with a science fiction author each month on what they think the year 2999 might look like".)The worst thing about 2999 is that this interview will still be archived somewhere, and precisely a thousand years from now some curious kid will

Comments

How many people today can read Chaucer?

[jjjiii]

By 2999, will anyone still understand such an ancient dialect of English?

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[mistersleepless]

When Chaucer stops being taught in schools, you might have a point.

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[jjjiii]

Well, to put it another way, by 2999 they might not be able to read the media your words are encoded on, or (long shot here, assuming technology & civilization don't crash in the meantime) they may not be able to read the file format. Those issues might be more important than linguistic drift.

I mean, you're a fairly famous, published author, so chances are better than most that your words will be preserved, but 2999 is longer from now than Shakespeare is, and we have relatively little preserved from such a short time ago, though still quite a lot is known of that time.

The technology will certainly exist to preserve more of what's here now for future generations, but I think it depends more on the willingness of people to keep information alive.

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[lots42]

Look at google. And other archives. People are archiving HEADERS for crying out loud. If that isn't a sign we're doomed to be ruled by geeks...

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[jjjiii]

Hmm... Sounds like "wading through crap" may be more of a problem than remembering the good stuff will be, if you want to think of it in that way... if you can make it into google, which, of course isn't too hard... it might be harder, in fact, if you're publishing to the world, to keep yourself out of it.

Still, I've got CD-Rs of unpublished data that I burned <5 years ago, and I can't read from them today because the media they were burned to was shite. There's probably still good data there for a forensics expert to grab, but for how long? There's movies that were filmed <100 years ago which were loved by millions, thought to be unforgettable, and far more popular than anything I've ever done, but now are now lost because the film stock deteriorated before it could be rediscovered and restored. There's something to be said for the proven durability of a finely made book. Will google's cache last as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls? It'd be interesting to calculate the Vegas casino odds on that bet.

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[superscuba]

How many people still have phonographs? No one. But that doesn't mean recordings made on wax cylinders are completely lost to us today. Now you can buy those same recordings on CD (www.tinfoil.com). Even Chaucer gets translated from the original Middle English to Modern English so those who can't read the original can still read it somehow. There's always going to be someone who'll go and dig up the past.

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[jjjiii]

And how many of Chaucer's contemporaries have we retained, exactly? We can't even know for certain.

Re: How many people today can read Chaucer?

[librarygorilla]

I had Chaucer and Beowulf in school as recently as ten years ago. But given how many pre industructible mediapieces of information still exist from past millenia, I'd say there's little doubt that we or our descendants will never be able to escape the things we say online, stupid or otherwise.

So best to start mastering the art of spin now.