The other day I was thinking that “humanity is doing it again.” But the thought was not about destruction or renewal, per se, but related to technology. Information is being rapidly phased out in a tangible form under the perceived improvement of digital, cloud-based, or such. Libraries, governmental records, and evidence that reports our existence, customs, and joys is being digitized. But the truth is that one great EMP would wipe it all out and, thereby, wipe out evidence that you and I exist, along with understandings and philosophies of the world. Known history would be gone in a flash just as has likely happened in the past.
What would be left in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? In current humanity’s case, plastic and stone.And the future human beings will look at the only things possible to find of us and think “they were pretty uncivilized.” The great art of the last two thousand years would disintegrate, and only graffiti in some train tunnel would remain. Books would turn to dust, and all digital information would be erased.
Maybe a massive solar discharge would cause it, finally proving the electric universe model. But the survivors, living in caves, will only remember what the sky looked like – lightning flashing sideways. They will pass those stories down orally, draw weird stick figures with spike hair or sunbursts on cave walls. No one will know that we have drawn them before.
There are peoples and traditions of the world that think it very important to pass on their lineages of information and knowing intact. That way, the wisdom cannot be lost. The highest teachings and ethics will lead us forward, out of the dark and the cold, or this time around, the dark and the heat. What if the true meanings and dates of the Ancient Egyptian murals and stone structures were known, or the meaning and use of thousands of sights and artifacts of the world? But just as a 20 year old might not know an 8-track tape if he held it, a three year old in the waiting area of a bank could not identify a corded phone. She had no idea what to do with it. Does that make everyone who does less evolved?
Are we doing it again: setting ourselves up for a collective amnesia when the big poof happens?
