I used to think historians in the future will have too much to work with. I could be wrong

 (I thought I had already posted this but the blogger system we use say I didn't. Apologies if I did. Most likely is that I posted something similar. When you blog for X years you forget what you've already blogged on.) 

Historians who study ancient Greece often have to work with fragments of text or just a few pottery shards. Nowadays we preserve so much that historians 1000 years from now will have an easier time. Indeed, they may have too much to look at; and have to sort through news, fake news, opinions, and satires, to figure out what was true.

The above is what I used to think. But I could be wrong. 

1) When technology changes stuff is lost. E.g., Floppy disks.

2) (This inspiration for this blog post) Harry Lewis gave a talk in Zurich on 

The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the origins of computer arithmetic

On Dec 8, 2022 at 1:15PM-3:30PM Zurich time. I didn't watch it live (to early in the morning, east coast time) but it was taped and I watched a recording later. Yeah!

His blog about it (see here) had a pointer to the video, and my blog about it (see here) had a pointer to both the video and to his blog.

A while back  I was writing a blog post where I wanted to point to the video. My link didn't work. His link didn't work. I emailed him asking where it was. IT IS LOST FOREVER! Future Historians will not know about Leibniz and binary! Or they might--- he has a book on the topic that I reviewed here. But what if the book goes out of print and the only information on this topic is my review of his book? 

3) Entire journals can vanish. I blogged about that here.

4) I am happy that the link to the Wikipedia entry on Link Rot (see here) has not rotted.

5) I did a post on what tends to NOT be recorded and hence may be lost forever here.

6) (This is  bigger topic than my one point here.) People tend to OWN less than they used to. 

DVDs-don't bother buying! Whatever you want is on streaming (I recently watched, for the first time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one episode a day, on Treadmill, and it was great!)

CD's- don't bother buying!  use Spotify. I do that and its awesome-I have found novelty songs I didn't know about! Including a song by The Doubleclicks  which I thought was about Buffy: here. I emailed them about that it and they responded with: Hello! Buffy, hunger games, divergent, Harry Potter, you name it.

JOURNALS- don't bother buying them, its all on arXiv (Very true in TCS, might be less true in other fields). 

CONFERENCES: Not sure. I think very few have paper proceedings. At one time they gave out memory sticks with all the papers on them, so that IS ownership though depends on technology that might go away. Not sure what they do now. 

This may make it easier to lose things since nobody has a physical copy. 

7) Counterargument: Even given the points above, far more today IS being preserved than used to be. See my blog post on that here. But will that be true in the long run? 

8) I began saying that I used to think future historians will have to much to look at and have to sort through lots of stuff (using quicksort?) to figure out whats true. Then I said they may lose a lot. Oddly enough, both might be true- of the stuff they DO have they will have a hard time figuring out whats true (e.g., Was Pope Leo's ugrad thesis on Rado's Theorem for Non-Linear Equations? No. See my blog about that falsehood getting out to the world here. Spoiler alert- it was my fault.)

QUESTIONS:

1) Am I right--- will the future lose lots of stuff?

2) If so, what can we do about this? Not clear who we is in that last sentence.