Did the Egyptians lose their data in the cloud?
From the ancient Egyptians to this Substack post. Is the answer to enduring knowledge calving our work in stone? Going back to the dawn of time leads us to an interesting conclusion.
In Never Stop Learning this week I will be covering the following 1-2-3:
One Big Thing - What is permanence these days?
Two Recommendations - a message from the Stoics and a podcast that will blow your mind about your place in the universe
My Top 3 articles of the week
Enjoy.
One Big Thing: What is permanence these days?
A job for this weekend could be to start calving this post into the stone tablet I just bought from the local builders yard. Or maybe that’s not necessary.
Let me explain.
In 3,000 years, when archaeologists start to unearth remains of a great civilisation from the turn of the 21st century they will find our obsession with steel and an avalanche of plastic. It may even be called “the Plastic Age”. That would be sad. A whole layer of plastic encasing the sea bed with great steel cities towering over them.
But what else will there be?
Nothing of our scientific discoveries, nothing of our culture and certainly nothing of how we lived day to day.
Strange really, given the unending knowledge that sits at our finger tips on our “smart” devices.
All this is gone. Dust. In fact, it won’t be dust because much of it doesn’t even exist in physical form today. They exist in bytes, on hard drives, on “floppy” disks (remember them?) and of course in the “cloud”.
My thoughts spiralled the other day from a conversation that culminated in the comment “well, of course you must download all your articles from Substack? Just in case…” It was a great point. It would be a travesty if Substack disappeared overnight maybe through a Russian bot attack or a spilt cup of coffee at Substack HQ (It happens).
So, downloading your posts is a good idea. But to where?
Nowhere is truly safe. I’ve got photos from the late 2000s that are stuck on a memory stick that simply won’t fit any of the latest holes on my new laptop.
I’ve got negatives from photos taken in the 90’s that I’d probably need to take to a history professor at my local university to have them developed.
And of course, we all have old photo albums from many decades ago that are fading. Well, we think they’re fading as we daren’t take them out of their box for fear the whole thing will fall apart.
Our knowledge is vulnerable
Today, although there’s more knowledge and “content” produced than ever before in the history of the human race, it has never been more vulnerable.
Let’s zoom back in time to ancient Egypt. We know there was a vast civilisation here that survived for over 30 centuries; many times longer than our “Plastic Age”. And yet, we know very little about what happened at that time.
The little that we do know is thanks to stone. The Rosetta Stone in fact.
Sitting in pride of place at the British Museum it holds the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs discovered across the Ancient Egyptian remains.
The stone itself is unremarkable for its message. The value lies in the three languages calved into the stone:
Hieroglyphs - suitable for priestly decree
Demotic - the Egyptian language used for daily purposes
Ancient Greek - a language scholars today can understand
Amazingly, the stone had the same message written in all three languages so forming the keystone for unlocking the whole treasure trove of Egyptian knowledge.
Without that stroke of luck we could have been totally in the dark on what happened during 3,000 years of human civilisation. We’d still have those massive pyramids of course but much less information about the people who built them.
So should we be calving all our work into stone?
Don’t despair, there’s a different type of permanence that we should take into account here. The permanence of continuity.
We pass down knowledge from generation to generation.
"We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours."
John of Salisbury, 1159
Think of the great inventors of the Plastic Age. If you drop Steve Jobs into Ancient Egypt he’s not going to invent the Apple Mac. What he achieved in his life was because of all the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of human progress.
More importantly, it’s the thousands of years of handing down knowledge to the next generation so we can move things on to the next level.
So this is how we ensure our ideas, our culture and who we are survives.
We pass on ideas through education, through leading by example and through posting bytes on a silly website called Substack.
So there you are. You don’t need to buy a stone tablet to have permanence after all. You just need to keep reading, writing and getting the ideas out there. By teaching, discussing and getting our knowledge and experience out there we can ensure it survives and is built on by future generations.
Two Recommendations - what to consume this week
1. 5 Life Changing Journaling Habits from the Stoics
After watching this I might just have the motivation to start again with journaling. I know it will be help me but to date I haven’t been able to make the habit stick.
2. The Joe Rogan Experience - Brian Cox
This one will blow your mind. Brian Cox has an innate ability to take the most complicated concepts known to man and break them down so that anyone can understand them. Marry that together with Joe Rogan’s masterful ability to ask the stupid questions we are all wanted to ask and you have a well spent couple of hours.
Top 3 articles of the week
Finding great articles on Substack can be difficult. Fear not, I have been digging deep into the discovery areas of the platform so you don’t have to.
Here are my top three posts to read this week:
Cold hands, warm and stressed heart by
ofHow to Master Just About Anything (Part 1) by
of ofSubstack Recommendations
A big part of this newsletter is the community we are building. Never Stop Learning recommends these Substacks that I suggest you check out.
Last week’s post
In case you missed it:
Plus, catch up on my latest How To Substack post:
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Thank you for reading and see you next week.
Such passing on of our knowledge and lessons from generation to generation is indeed important for the human race to survive and thrive.
I feel that in terms of lessons learnt, the next generation(s) should be firmly and thoroughly made aware of the mistakes of the past and their significance, so that they're more cautious and wary of repeating those mistakes.
If such crucial lessons aren't properly rooted in the minds of the new generations, then those mistakes, particularly the deadly and destructive ones, will continue happening. We see that a lot in modern history, mainly in terms of all the wars, conflicts, discrimination, injustices, inequality, etc.
This is a great article that also fills me with dread. When my husband died I saw how easy it was for all his documents and photos to go into a digital dark hole. Besides, people don't keep emails and texts, even if they are meaningful or beautifully written. While some effort will be made to keep information from the famous, I fear we will leave very little about our ordinary lives.
As an aside, you still see the names of businesses carved in stone on buildings in London. They may have gone out of business a long time ago, but it is hard to replace a deeply carved stone. Perhaps we should all carve our names on our houses!