With the ongoing move to all-digital, our generation will leave less information to future historians than anyone before us who used books, parchment, clay or stone to communicate.

@hypolite im not so sure thats true. I mean a lot of data will still get lost but we are coming up with archival backup methods that last long periods of time too, so we may just find out that more is saved.

@freemo we need the right formats, too. i think that is the hardest part. e.g. it'll be hard to reconstruct jpeg from scratch.

@bonifartius while I certainly agree jpeg would be tricky to reconstruct from scratch I feel like a future civilization that is as advanced as us or more could crack it. I've seen far more difficult things reversed engineered before.

@freemo indeed. i think it's extra hard though because of the many layers (hardware, physical layout of bits & bytes, file format) :)

@bonifartius it is a good deal harder than alot of things.. but im sure anthropologists will figure it out, might take them a few years, but they will get it.