When civilization ends and the internet dies, how will future historians know what we did?

Welcome to The Amateurist, where we ask the biggest, weirdest questions and try to get out the other side.

Hey peeps! This is your pal Nat, here to kick off the inaugural issue of The Amateurist, this place to learn oddly specific information about the world from someone (me) who knows a few things about a lot of stuff and who also has a lot of questions about why things are the way they are.

One of my favourite/most used/semi-compulsive pastimes since I was a teenager has been wasting time online to avoid responsibility and to put off going to bed at a reasonable hour, asking questions of the internet and falling down various informational wormholes for hours at a time. All of this is why I now carry things around with me like how ham radios work, that carbon monoxide causes ghost sightings, and the highest peaks on every continent.

It is not surprising that this info needs a place to go and I just can’t help myself when there’s an opportunity to talk about it with an audience who’s choosing to be here. Plus, I enjoy setting ambitious and arbitrary goals for myself just to see what happens.

And thus a newsletter was born.

So read, share widely, and hopefully we’ll all learn something.

The Amateurist base content is free but if you want to financially support me, a precariously-employed freelance writer, you can choose a monthly or annual paid subscription in exchange for my everlasting love and appreciation, and also some fun bonus content.

Here’s a sample of what you’re in for when you subscribe (please):

Do birds have languages?

How long can humans hold their breath?

Where does paper go when it’s recycled?

What happened to NASA’s human crash test pilots?

Oh, and to answer the title question, when civilization ends and the internet dies, how will future historians know what we did, people have thought of that already and are working on ways to de-digitize then re-digitize the intangible elements of modern human history.

The Rosetta Disk (I know, right) is just one way to preserve the legacy and detailed integrity of languages that will die out with humans. As part of a larger push by the Long Now Foundation to preserve and document modern human life, the analog disk contains a spiral of etched data that spans for over 14,000 microscopic pages and contains information about over a thousand different human languages.

What’s even cooler is that the outermost rings on the nickel disk are large enough to read with the naked eye and act as instructions for how to read on. In the spirit of the original Rosetta Stone, beginning with a kind of key that serves to “unlock” the other languages, the disk only needs optical magnification to read and archaeologists of the future can use it to decipher our world, just like the stone opened the door to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The foundation has other projects with similar goals as well, and they’ve said it could continue to include “a collection of the world's greatest literature, known cures for the diseases that plague humanity, blueprints for recreating major technology” and more. It looks like the real life social and cultural stuff could be retrievable, depending on what makes in onto the disk (and that has its own host of problems, considering the utter failure of those who “write history” to include the experiences and existences of those other than themselves).

In terms of the internet, it’s probably best if most of it is lost to time (yikes) but there are dozens of projects dedicated to mining and archiving online content. But all that hinges on whether the internet’s infrastructure will be accessible to those studying it in the future. The internet is just a bunch of tubes anyway, and the loss of a functioning power grid for who knows how long will almost certainly render servers useless, not to mention physical material degradation over time.

There might not be much left to find, so whoever’s doing the work needs to have some serious technological insight to gain access to this thing. And even if they did, maybe we should clear our search histories anyway.

Thanks, nerds! Onward!

Your friend, Nat