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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

If we create something of value it will naturally survive. Artificially extending the life of something transient is a waste.

When we except that both what we create and ourselves are transient, life become better. Concentrate on the now.

Edit: not sure which reply to reply to, so commenting here.

My badly made point was that trying ourselves to insure the longevity of something we create is not the best use of our time and resources.

If we create something of value, and it means something to other people, it will spread, and it will be saved for the future and future generations.

Society saving things for the future is essential, and we generally do a good job of it.

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It depends, of course, on your definition of value. It sounds a bit circular: if it is valuable, it will survive. If it doesn't survive, it isn't valuable.

For example, the public Norwegian broadcaster NRK lost its recordings of the moon landing (which was also the first night sending) [1], which I would consider quite valuable. Indeed, there is a long list of lost TV recordings from the early days of television [2].

[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/jakten-pa-den-historiske-apollo-send...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast

Off the top of my head, thing of value that didn’t naturally survive (that we know about) would include Aristotle’s second book of poetics (completely gone) and most of Sappho’s poetry (of which only fragments survive).

As paradoxical as it sounds, maybe more archiving and preservation in the past would’ve helped demonstrate to you how utterly wrong that is.

> If we create something of value it will naturally survive

Tell that to the 70% of silent films that are permanently lost.

Or the original tapes of the moon landings.

> Tell that to the 70% of silent films that are permanently lost.

Do we really miss them?

Except that, with that mindset, we'd never had a US Constitution, or a Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen.

History is made by people who want to make it. Shelley's Ozymandias is a paradox, not an admonition.

> If we create something of value it will naturally survive

This is easy to say if you're not involved in the work it takes to keep something alive.

> If we create something of value it will naturally survive

Ever heard of the library of Alexandria?

> Ever heard of the library of Alexandria?

Yes: the end of the library of Alexandria had virtually no impact on the preservation of knowledge.

The library of Alexandria slowly declined for various centuries, and was progressively replaced by dozens of libraries in the rest of the world. We don’t know how much of its materials was lost in time, but the key thing is that knowledge of that time was not preserved by libraries but by copies of documents. What we know from Antiquity is mostly due to scribes and monks who spend their life copying content, while libraries have been mostly useless for that purpose.

Yes, I agree with that. For example, if you really think something is worthwhile, write a book instead of keeping it on Wordpress.

That’s an absurdly arbitrary difference buried in a value judgement informed by your own personal biases. And, beauty is not always in the eye of the beholder.

So what? Other personal biases stated here are that everything should be preserved...it's an opinion. If I wanted a place where incontrovertible facts were written down, I would publish a math paper.

> For example, if you really think something is worthwhile, write a book instead of keeping it on Wordpress.

Why "instead"? Do both. Writing a book doesn’t really help preserving information: unless you’re really famous you’ll sell a few copies that will go lost, and in 10-20 years it will be impossible to find a single copy of the book. Plus a Wordpress blog is accessible from anywhere, while a book –again unless if you’re very successful– is usually distributed in one country only.

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