We are the flintstones

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do you think in the future things like elephants will be extinct and people will look at us like prehistoric humans or something, living amongst things like whales and polar bears? maybe in the future there will only be thing s like rats and racoons

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Thursday, 25 May 2006 20:40 (nineteen years ago)

Best almost non-sequitur between thread title and initial question yet.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 25 May 2006 20:45 (nineteen years ago)

You know, to take this question a little seriously just 'cause I find it interesting: I don't think so - not unless there's some global calamity & lo-o-ng subsequent rebuilding. We don't know what language, if any, prehistoric men had, and they left no written record of their doings: part of the reason why they seem so rudimentary to us is that our understanding of them is itself quite primitive. (This is less true for experts in the subject, obviously, who generally have a much richer understanding of how prehistoric humans lived their daily lives.) It's hard for me to imagine a future in which people wouldn't be able to actually read the historical record we left behind, and understand us on our own terms.

Of course, The 15th century left plenty of written records behind, but every year people become less and less able to tell the difference between medieval and Elizabethan, which indicates to me that, yes, even with the written record surviving, a future understanding of us will probably be quite distorted. I know this is all quite dull and fun-hating, what can I say, I find the question interesting & nothing was gonna happen here anyone so I thought I'd give it a go.

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Friday, 26 May 2006 12:33 (nineteen years ago)

It's a fine answer. :-) I wonder how they'll access data, though -- they might find the historical record of now actually more flimsy than that of fifty years back.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 26 May 2006 13:03 (nineteen years ago)

We must carve ILX on to giant stone tablets immediately.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Friday, 26 May 2006 13:06 (nineteen years ago)

Who knows what history will be told after the apocalypse doesn't come. Man has only inhabited the Earth for 342 years!

― dave's good arm (facsimile) (dave225.3), Friday, 26 May 2006 13:18 (nineteen years ago)

"Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun!"

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 26 May 2006 13:19 (nineteen years ago)

It's a fine answer. :-) I wonder how they'll access data, though -- they might find the historical record of now actually more flimsy than that of fifty years back.

Yea, there's a genuine concern about propietary file formats too even if they can read hard disks, cdrs etc.

― JW (ex machina), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:17 (nineteen years ago)

There will be us, small birds, insects and rats. Mmmmm, rat steaks garnished with ant heads.

― Bnad (Bnad), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:27 (nineteen years ago)

xpost: The only readable computer files will be the Coleco Adam.

― dave's good arm (facsimile) (dave225.3), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:31 (nineteen years ago)

We are the music records.

― scnnr drkly (scnnr drkly), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:35 (nineteen years ago)

And we are the dreamers of schemes.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:36 (nineteen years ago)

Love is a battlefield.

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 26 May 2006 14:50 (nineteen years ago)

The only readable computer files will be the Coleco Adam.

this makes me deleriously happy

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Friday, 26 May 2006 15:23 (nineteen years ago)

ouch, i think it just makes me delerious. i can still hear the whirring of the tape drive now.

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Friday, 26 May 2006 15:36 (nineteen years ago)

Future civilizations will wonder why it was a national obsession to convert Farenheit to Celcius and back.

― dave's good arm (facsimile) (dave225.3), Friday, 26 May 2006 15:42 (nineteen years ago)

I wonder if there was a Coleco or Betamax of the stone age? Maybe the best historical records were lost because the stone tablet won the format wars. Maybe the arranging of pine boughs was the communication tool of choice among the cavemen who learned to make jet fuel out of saltwater.

― dave's good arm (facsimile) (dave225.3), Friday, 26 May 2006 15:46 (nineteen years ago)

We must carve ILX on to giant stone tablets immediately.

If only there were a publicly available service that could take computer text and produce books from it. Oh wait...

― nickn (nickn), Friday, 26 May 2006 19:48 (nineteen years ago)

just a bit of fun, so let's be cool

― RJG (RJG), Saturday, 27 May 2006 00:35 (nineteen years ago)

Paper may rot and wither. Only mighty stone endures.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Saturday, 27 May 2006 00:54 (nineteen years ago)

dont woryy - there will always be hardrives - one day you will be able to copy and recopy all of ILX's majesty onto a hardrive the size of Bush's brain in a nanosecond. The wonders of technology! there will be a day when there are hard drives embedded in our bones

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Saturday, 27 May 2006 04:55 (nineteen years ago)

but the filesystem formats

― JW (ex machina), Saturday, 27 May 2006 05:10 (nineteen years ago)

jon is otm, I would guess that there'll be enough "oops, didn't think of that moments" along the line as technology develops that a tremendous amount of data will go into a sort of not-lost-but-not-accessible limbo

I really like the idea of this, but that's my personal hobbyhorse

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Saturday, 27 May 2006 13:58 (nineteen years ago)

There's plenty of examples already, of course, my favorite being a slew of data from 60s/70s planetary probe missions which because of changes in computers/formats means a lot of the data is essentially unusable or unavailable. (The newer missions have superseded a lot of the older results, to be sure, but still.)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:00 (nineteen years ago)

I'm sure there's the plot for a cyberpunk novel to be found in all this somewhere.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:23 (nineteen years ago)

Neuroroffler

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:48 (nineteen years ago)

Virtual Lol

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:49 (nineteen years ago)

Snorly? Crash

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:59 (nineteen years ago)

The Rosetta stone of the future is going to be when someone finds a hard disk with C source code to UNRAR/UNARJ

Also, let's not forget about hard drive protocols:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI

The list of "Standards" there is pretty long, no? And SCSI drives make up only a small part of the mass storage devices we have.

― JW (ex machina), Saturday, 27 May 2006 15:04 (nineteen years ago)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Attachment#ATA_standards_versions.2C_transfer_rates.2C_and_features

― JW (ex machina), Saturday, 27 May 2006 15:06 (nineteen years ago)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Attachment#ATA_standards_versions.2C_transfer_rates.2C_and_features
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Frequency_Modulation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Length_Limited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Code_Recording

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST-506

― JW (ex machina), Saturday, 27 May 2006 15:12 (nineteen years ago)

Does anyone else feel like we are living right on the crux of ultramodernity, here in 2006? Or does everyone think that, regardless of what year they are in??

― JTS (JTS), Saturday, 27 May 2006 20:20 (nineteen years ago)

Technology has been advancing at a ridiculous rate for the past few decades, and we have quite a lot of stuff that looks like it's from the future. I don't think they could say that 1487.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Saturday, 27 May 2006 20:24 (nineteen years ago)

surely they can reverse -engineer to read any data? what about how voyager contains a record of earth sounds? I wonder if aliens will play that or just make it into jewelry

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Sunday, 28 May 2006 02:01 (nineteen years ago)

three years pass...

1. Rock Hudson

2. Sharon Stone

― chip dumstorf, Sunday, 9 August 2009 03:06 (sixteen years ago)

I wonder if there's any implication at all of the Flintstones being very very distant ancestors of the Jetsons?

― Well, I wrote some stuff and Kenny Loggins heard it, so, y'know... (EDB), Sunday, 9 August 2009 03:21 (sixteen years ago)

I'm about to blow your mind:

What if the Jetsons are actually the post-nuclear apocalypse descendents of the Flintstones?

― you guys are Buellers, essentially (latebloomer), Sunday, 9 August 2009 05:14 (sixteen years ago)

wait, i meant what if the Flintstones are the post-apocalyptic descendents of the Jetsons

― you guys are Buellers, essentially (latebloomer), Sunday, 9 August 2009 05:31 (sixteen years ago)

I think in the future, we will drive cars like the Flintstones, cuz they AIN'T GON BE NO GAS MANG

― Cyberdune Butt (Elvin Wayburn Phillips), Sunday, 9 August 2009 19:56 (sixteen years ago)

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