Refugee thread!

[Dr H]

As far as destroying the historical record, or burning the library, I wouldn't be so sure about that.  For all convenient practical purposes that's the way it may be for us.  But TTA had international participation.  All those posts went through a lot of servers to circulate among the members.  It would be hard to believe that most, if not all of the content hasn't been backed up dozens, if not hundreds of times, in multiple places.  We may never see any of it again, but it's not too difficult for me to imagine some future digital archeologist unearthing the bulk of my posts on, say, single malt -- replete in all their glorious misspellings and typos -- at some distant future date.

Unless one of TTA's members became famous for some reason -- or infamous -- no future scholar would likely be interested.  Our information, even if it still exists somewhere, will be buried in mountains of the stuff.

Well, true enough.  Not many people are interested in meticulously researching the life of Caesar's third cousin's second butler.

Except for doctoral students.  Someday a Ph.D. candidate somewhere is going to be handed a research topic by their advisor, on "Atheist Angst in Early 21st Century Web Fora" -- and boom!   We're all famous.

Posthumously, of course, but famous nonetheless.

If climate change and population collapse are humanity's most likely future, future people will be busy doing other things.  Plus all of our present accomplishments will be seen in a very different light given their likely context.

They won't be able to exist outside; they'll have nothing to do but sit at home in front of their computers and data mine the past.

I was more concerned about saving TTA's discussions for participants who would be interested in reading or rereading them themselves.  We covered a lot of interesting perspectives and ideas.

That we did.

I bet we can do it again.