Van Rijn will be remembered as hero or villain but never as saint. In Dominic Flandry's time, there will be a planet named Vanrijn. And, in Dominic Flandry's time, Flandry's own murdered fiancee, the Orthochristian Kossara Vymezal, will be canonized and remembered as St. Kossara. The Jerusalem Catholic Church links the first Technic History instalment, "The Saturn Game," to the last Flandry period novel, The Game of Empire, but will Christian traditions still be remembered millennia later on any of the inhabited planets in the period of the Commonalty? That is one of the many unanswered questions of the Technic History.
9 comments:
Historical memory operates differently in advanced, predominately literate societies. The problem is that those haven't been around long enough for us to know precisely -how- it's different, particularly over the long term.
My -guess- would be that much less will ever be forgotten. Much, much less.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Because so many records and books would survive the fall of the Empire. Unlike in Roman and Medieval times books did not need to be painfully and slowly copied by hand.
Well, I can see some planets, in the chaos of the Long Night, being forced to go back to hand copying.
Ad astra! Sean
I suppose I meant: Will forms of Christianity survive as living traditions? Of course the historical records will be far more durable than in the past.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course, because I believe that survival is part of the plan and will of God.
As for your second point I'm now wondering how many books and records would survive the fall of a high tech civilization like that of the Empire? I think thousands of planets would soon see computer systems crashing to uselessness. Meaning many, many books and records kept in computerized data banks would be lost.
There could again be Catholic monasteries laboriously copying surviving books by hand.
Ad astra! Sean
I rather hope this works out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
It sounds like even though it takes lasers to write it, the tech for reading it is fairly low, optical microscope & polarizer. So people whose tech level has been knocked back can still read it.
I also saw the claim that as long as it isn't melted it should remain readable for billions of years.
Kaor, Jim!
I dunno, offhand, assuming a massive collapse of a high tech FTL civilization, many planets might not even be aware of "obsolete" optical laser tech. Also, the chaos of the Long Night, attended by social and economic collapse, wars, anarchy, piracy, etc., also seems to make widespread use of optical lasers unlikely.
Ad astra! Sean
I got the impression that it is readable electronically so it would be useful on a computer, that it is compact so it would store *lots* of data in a small volume, so it might well be in widespread use in a high tech society.
Reading it with a microscope & polarizer would be less convenient, but as long as the post-collapse people *know* that possibly useful information can be read from these items in that way they are likely to check them out.
Kaor, Jim!
I still think you are being too optimistic. A really massive civilizational collapse means that society hitting bottom HARD. For a long, long time the survivors will be too busy just barely staying alive to even think of optical lasers.
Ad astra! Sean
If I understand the idea correctly, lasers are only needed to *write* the disks. *Reading* the disks can be done with much more primitive tech, a microscope & polarizer.
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