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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.

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That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics.

The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.

In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It's like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice/ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.

I'm not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?

Going on a tangent: it's somewhat funny that people always talk about the birds and the bees. Bee reproduction is complicated. For example, male bees have no father. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenotoky

I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.

Huh, you're right, scribes copying texts are actually a great analogy for evolutionary perspective on life! The information in the books is what matters, and from the POV of a scribe, a book is useful only so that it can be copied, and afterwards, with new copies safe and in circulation, the old ones may just as well rot or burn.

The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).

Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.

I think OPs point wasn't specifically about how to preserve and recover the books, but about how something unimaginable, can happen and can our sci-fi writers come up with such unimaginable now, but possible in the future plot.

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