Hypothetically, if governments wordwide just suddenly became authoritarian and deleted all records of history, you and some survivors escape to a remote area outside of government control, they all can’t remember much from history (either didn’t pay attwntion in class, or suffers memory loss from the governemtn attacks) and so you are designated as this community’s official historian. How much can you remember? What’s gonna be the official narrative of your little rebel community?
This is not much of a hypothetical scenario. History is being written with a bias or outright misrepresentation and has been forever.
The clear soda craze was the defining point of the 1990s. That’s about it.
There were troll dolls too.
Truly the age of enlightenment
The government doesn’t control all the information. I’ll still have my offline copy of Wikipedia, on my phone, that contains a lot of the world’s history. Apart from that I just remember some mythology, some stuff about the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Incas, British, Americans, and Indians, plus a reasonable understanding of WW2 and the holocaust, plus various historical events that have happened in my lifetime.
This hypothetical is assuming you are in an active warzone (think like 1984’s world) and have no time to find your stuff, or you just accidentally drop it while running away from government troops.
You just had to run until you find a safe place (like a secret underground bunker or something) and have nothing on you beside your memories.
While I understand it doesn’t quite fit the scenario, it does strike me as a good way to preserve “lost information” in a similar situation. Pair that with a solar charger (or even improvise something like a pedal charger), and you’re pretty set for a lot of basic information people would struggle to reconstruct.
Congratulations, you’ve just written a quarter of the plot of the Book of Eli with Denzel Washington
Some ebook readers have a microsd card slot, so you could fit an offline copy of Wikipedia on a device with half a year of battery life (in airplane mode)
A lot less than I think I could
That is hosted in the USA and um…
checks news
future not looking so bright right now 😬
I wouldn’t bother with history at that point. History only matters when we can rely on there being a future. And if the big oops happens, all that matters is raw survival and STEM (with the pure M being optional).
I probably can’t remember much aside my own countries history, and even if I wouldn’t be able to give exact years and such. Luckily the whole of English Wikipedia (text-only) is roughly 100GB so I would probably distribute the records or requested articles via the black market. Also, this is basically how people in Cuba get access to internet content.
rotates chair to glance at collection of hard copy encyclopedias & encyclopedic dictionary
I can recall the gist of European history from year 900 through 1850ish. Then in a lot more detail after that. Outside of Europe my history knowledge is mostly a subsection of European colonialism.
That’s the ending of Fahrenheit 451!
For me, the risk is remembering things that are factually wrong. With no one to correct me, I would be worried about getting stuff wrong the whole time
And the beginning of A Canticle for Leibowitz!
Amazing book
Why bother? It repeats itself, yes? Fuck that. Start fresh.
THIS IS A DISTRACTION FROM THE EPSTEIN FILES! RELEASE THE FILES! Don’t let it distract you from your purpose!
Me personally?
A lot but summarized to hilarious extent. Example:
So mosses was like “guys I found a stream!” And god was like “the fuck you find?” And Moses was like “I mean god provided me a stream”
God was like “yeah it’s fine… the book i gave you described me as a chill god right? Not a jealous vengeful god… this is totally settled”
Then they arrived at the promised land and god was like “you can all stay here! Except mosses… he can fuck off to the stream he totally found”
Anyway my point is it wouldn’t be one person remembering all of history. It would be like f 451 where everyone remembers one book or one bit of history.
I can’t wait to read the New Aeao Version of the Holy Bible.
I thought of making a YouTube series where I summarize the whole bible like that lol book by book.
I also regularly summarize history to my kids like that. You should hear my Texas independence story lol
If you think the tale of mosses is real history then we really are screwed.
It’s not necessarily a real historical event, but an incredibly important story about liberation of the oppressed that influenced countless real historical movements.
Herodotus’ histories is mostly fictional but you wouldn’t want to forget it. Same with the Iliad/Odyssey, Epic of Gilgamesh, etc
Fair, but the context that they are not real historical events is critical.
I’d argue if you taught someone history and never mentioned the Bible you’ve left out an important chunk of history.
Besides it’s about as whimsical and fantastical as all history of that time period was.
I got this, I watch dr. stone
big bang - earth cooled - life appeared - life evolved - dinosaurs at some point ended by meteor - small mammals survived and evolved eventually to apes - apes evolved to early homminids I think going roughly authrolopithiciens to home sapien with many intermediary homos in there like habilis and interpred with another branch neandrathal (cro magnum is in there somewhere maybe after anthropolicicien). During all this evolution brains got bigger and things like art, tool use, language, and fire use became a thing. Early religion and ritual developed around birth and death and likely day to day essential activities. We came from a scavenger back ground but our tool use became weapons and we started to hunt. Over time we more and more intentionally started to plant seeds and keep animals which became farming. This lead to our species becoming less nomadic and as we started to stay in one location we started creating more robust shelter and infrastructure which lead cities and tribes becoming states. Earliest large ones we know are out of the middle east but kinda expanded west. Sumer to babylon to egypt. Then north. greek - roman. Expansion continued with a bunch of stuff in asia and europe and in between and surprisingly trade managed to flow across the known world while on the other side of the world in america you had a lot of folks sorta leading simpler lives but there was the inca empire. We think humans evolved in africa and spread out from there and at some point crossed to america during an ice age that created a land bridge. man this is long im tired. history over.
I have a stack of Encyclopedia Britannica in my parents storage.
All records of history have been deleted.
Like others, I question the ability to delete a book. And while a regime would be able to change digital literature easily, and educational literature like school books being a close second; changing a book in someone’s storage unit is a lot harder.
It also handwaves away the other ways we keep history as well. Would people’s family photo albums be deleted? What about a great grandma’s diary? In some rural areas the family bible has some insanely well kept family records.
You can’t delete a book
You can’t delete a book
nonsense, raise it’s temp to 451f and it’ll delete easily.
“Hypothetically”
Quick question - did you have breakfast this morning?……
That’s missing the entire point of this hypothetical question.
I have a stack of the Animorphs in my attic. Yours is just speculative fiction.
…huh?
How would you prove that your books reflect the true history?
Ok, I see what you mean. Counterpoint: how could/would anyone? If someone wanted to have “faith” enough they could feasibly handwave away anything that didn’t jive with what they wanted the past to be. And in a situation where cross referencing would be nigh on impossible? I mean…I’ve got nothing. “Trust me bro.”
