Thinking about world building & the consequences of “too much” history. In many sci-fi tales parts of history are forgotten— some cataclysm results in a society with about as much history as we have: some 20k years with the last 2000 being most referenced and the last 100 (living memory) of real consequence.
But what if you had a million years of detailed written history? What about a billion? I think there is a reason so many sci-fi stories have the trope “we forgot the location of earth”
@futurebird History (with big H) would be much more important and developed than nowadays. As you said, for almost every historical situation in the now, there should be a parallel situation somewhere in the past, in another society, in another planet, to learn from.
An in-character explanation:
An important part of the Historian guild work is to find these situations, translate them to the current language, translate the concepts to the current society, and point out an adequate interpretation; all of it in a reasonable time frame (days to weeks).
Fortunately, the Archivist guild provides all the historical data in the current digital format, having had translated and converted digital formats thousands of times since the first computers, more than a million years ago.
Searches in the Archives are slow, but very accurate: the Programmer guild created, refined (and many times rediscovered) the best possible search algorithms.
@futurebird I think the "forgetting the location of the earth" is just a natural extension of the current state of affairs: do you really know where your great-great-great-ancestors came from? Most people can only vaguely wave at a continent or two when you go four or five generations back - the exact, precise rock where those people of old lived on is not just forgotten, but largely unimportant. I would think in the same way future sci-fi people will have a rough idea of the general spiral arm of the galaxy where people came from, and there will be delta-quadrant-supremacists who have whole religions structured around the idea that they never came from that backwater Orion-arm ...
@futurebird
I think, even with a population of modest constant size and conservative approach to language, a million years of detailed written history would result in a glyph set a few orders of magnitude larger than unicode. I think it would be challenging just to learn all the glyphs, even in 200 years.
@futurebird
I can think of a few SF series where "we forgot the location of the Earth" was part of the background, and then, in later developments, the end of civilization on Earth was found to be both tragic and somewhat shamefull, but not having the kind of excitement or drama that would make its end memorable.
@futurebird I have a hard time suspending my disbelief when a writer talks about a tradition dating back "4,000 years" or something (generally in fantasy fiction) because after a couple hundred years, people are playing a game of telephone with successive generations. Nothing that old is transmitted faithfully across millennia for 100 reasons.
@chrispackham@futurebird
Hmm, what's the oldest extant tradition we have in the real world? Both Nowruz (Persian) and the Mid-Autumn Festival (Chinese) claim over 3,000 years...
Some of the indigenous traditions will also be pretty old, if harder to date accurately
While impossible to generalize, I think we tend to assume that indigenous traditions are much older than they really are due to a notion that cultures without written language are in a kind of eternal stasis and not experiencing the same cultural and technological revolutions that riddle written histories. It’s comforting but also a little smug and superior. If I had to guess I’d say writing things down slows the pace of change.
@futurebird@sabik@chrispackham
I have a "ship of Theseus" view of very old traditions; surely, they change over time, and given enough time, every component may change, but still, the tradition continues.
So much history is hard to imagine. There is, even with our less vast history, a tendency to simply ignore entire regions, cultures, vast swaths of time in an attempt to reduce history into a story that can fit in a human mind and be surveyed in a human lifetime. I guess the simple answer is those with more history would simply ignore more. Rather than ignoring regions & eras, it would be planetary systems & epochs.
But a deep enough history well cataloged & searchable? It becomes a mirror.
If you want to know how to deal with a problem you could look up how thousands of other civilizations dealt with the same issue. You could find numerous historical twins: people who share your profession and struggles and discover the course of their life. Artists and writers would need to admit that the project of telling the story themselves matters as much as inventing some new kind of story. Because the same story was invented in similar circumstances in the past.
There has always been a strain of frontierism in sci-fi. We can argue if that can be separated from the colonial, from a conquest-driven vision of the world. But what would it mean to be in a world without frontiers?
And it’s not that their science would have all the answers— people would always find themselves rediscovering— reinventing. Because the real issue is how much one can learn in a 200 year long human life. All the answers are in the library but no mind can hold them at once.
@futurebird One of the threads in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series (particularly in the novella "Green Mars" that spawned it) was what it would be like mentally for humans to be extremely long-lived, and he imagined personal memory fading to oblivion for events far enough back in the past that people effectively had a gradually shifting succession of lives. It became too hard to ignore that the person you used to be was someone else.
But that's just personal memory, not institutional memory, which will also eventually become vast if we don't have cataclysms that turn the past before them into a Dark Age.
@futurebird Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In The Sky" took a stab at something similar, imagining what software engineering (still a very young discipline today) would be like with a tradition going back thousands of years, with legacy code in the codebase that was actually that old. There are "programmer-archaeologists".
@futurebird
TBH I also see The Council For Historical Analysis, Department Of Municipality, Infrastructure Chapter, For City Of Nggfgufdrh, being still locked in the 30 year old debate whether the trucks picking up trash should be green or orange, based on the overwhelming evidence for there being less crime and more happiness in their periods of choice.
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