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Jan. 23rd, 2008 05:29 amI received Pokemon FireRed in the mail yesterday.
Last night, I asked Dad whether it would be possible that, in the future, we would be able to actually escape this planet so that humanity can continue to exist. He said that it's doubtful that that will ever happen, and we continued to talk about it for the following minute or so.
Shortly before we all went to bed, I picked up on the same conversation, asking Mom and Dad about how long people desire their legacies (such as works of art or architecture to last vs. how long they actually can last. They said that a lot of things existing today will be gone long before humanity ceases to exist. The first example cited (by Mom) was something about the Buddhists acknowledging that nothing lasts for ever. They create mosaics for people to enjoy, but after a while, those same mosaics are taken apart to make room for new works. Dad said that, sometimes, he wonders how long everything he built will ever last, although some of those things have already passed their prime. Even though he didn't refer to anything in particular, the most notable example of his works is obviously the catboat, which was only completed a few years ago and is still perfectly intact.
I told Dad that I wonder how long things like books, movies, anime, games, etc. can last. Dad said that there are so many of those that very few can last a relatively long time. I'm sure that even if we did find a planet to which we could send people and things, it's still highly unlikely that something like my Mon Colle Knights DVDs will even last long enough to get imported, let alone actually be imported for preservation. Dad told me that even in an age where we can copy old VHS content onto DVD, something which may have been popular half a century ago (such as The Beverly Hillbillies) won't be nearly as entertaining today. I did agree with that, but I did mention that, as works of art, the value of something even unpopular today, such as MCK or Makeruna Makendou Z, is bound to go up in decades to come. Mom told me that I was thinking of antiques, but history is full of examples where one-of-a-kind works have been lost or even purposely destroyed. Dad cited the example of Alexander the Great and his armies finding libraries of scrolls in the Meditteranean and simply setting fire to them without ever knowing what the scrolls spoke of. On the contrary, he also mentioned that, during the Dark Ages, monks copied Greek and Roman writings into the Bible, and by doing so, they preserved material that was written long before their time.
The last thing I finished the conversation with was a reference to the Angry Video Game Nerd's acts of destroying a copy of, first, a Sega 32X, and then, a VHS copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (both of which can be seen happening here). As much as he said both of these items sucked, they're still bound to have more and more collector's value as time goes on. There can only be so many copies of anything, and the fact that we're able to transfer content onto ROMs, ISOs, the Wii Virtual Console, DVD, and YouTube still can't make something last forever, only longer. Such a feat would never have been possible in ancient times. Even if video game consoles were preserved for the next one hundred years, it's doubtful that any remaining copies of even something as new as the Wii would be useable by then, and even with backwards compatibility of CD-based games, the games of today would still only be playable if their content was transfered either onto ISOs or a future equivalent of the Virtual Console.
However, to conclude this entry, the real tragedy that was explained by the disappearence of humanity wouldn't be the loss of individual legacies; it would be the loss of any evidence of intelligent life having ever existed on Earth. It was one thing that the dinosaurs were all killed off millions of years ago, because they weren't intelligent life forms like us humans. They couldn't leave anything behind for us to enjoy, save for their own biological remains. But despite what Dad said last night about us being pretty much trapped here, there are some people (myself included) who have faith that in the future, we might be able to artifically modify planets with things like oxygen plants. I do know that something like that would take some extreme scientific advances, but who 25 years ago would have known that the Internet would be possible, or that it would be possible to send someone to the Moon?
Last night, I asked Dad whether it would be possible that, in the future, we would be able to actually escape this planet so that humanity can continue to exist. He said that it's doubtful that that will ever happen, and we continued to talk about it for the following minute or so.
Shortly before we all went to bed, I picked up on the same conversation, asking Mom and Dad about how long people desire their legacies (such as works of art or architecture to last vs. how long they actually can last. They said that a lot of things existing today will be gone long before humanity ceases to exist. The first example cited (by Mom) was something about the Buddhists acknowledging that nothing lasts for ever. They create mosaics for people to enjoy, but after a while, those same mosaics are taken apart to make room for new works. Dad said that, sometimes, he wonders how long everything he built will ever last, although some of those things have already passed their prime. Even though he didn't refer to anything in particular, the most notable example of his works is obviously the catboat, which was only completed a few years ago and is still perfectly intact.
I told Dad that I wonder how long things like books, movies, anime, games, etc. can last. Dad said that there are so many of those that very few can last a relatively long time. I'm sure that even if we did find a planet to which we could send people and things, it's still highly unlikely that something like my Mon Colle Knights DVDs will even last long enough to get imported, let alone actually be imported for preservation. Dad told me that even in an age where we can copy old VHS content onto DVD, something which may have been popular half a century ago (such as The Beverly Hillbillies) won't be nearly as entertaining today. I did agree with that, but I did mention that, as works of art, the value of something even unpopular today, such as MCK or Makeruna Makendou Z, is bound to go up in decades to come. Mom told me that I was thinking of antiques, but history is full of examples where one-of-a-kind works have been lost or even purposely destroyed. Dad cited the example of Alexander the Great and his armies finding libraries of scrolls in the Meditteranean and simply setting fire to them without ever knowing what the scrolls spoke of. On the contrary, he also mentioned that, during the Dark Ages, monks copied Greek and Roman writings into the Bible, and by doing so, they preserved material that was written long before their time.
The last thing I finished the conversation with was a reference to the Angry Video Game Nerd's acts of destroying a copy of, first, a Sega 32X, and then, a VHS copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (both of which can be seen happening here). As much as he said both of these items sucked, they're still bound to have more and more collector's value as time goes on. There can only be so many copies of anything, and the fact that we're able to transfer content onto ROMs, ISOs, the Wii Virtual Console, DVD, and YouTube still can't make something last forever, only longer. Such a feat would never have been possible in ancient times. Even if video game consoles were preserved for the next one hundred years, it's doubtful that any remaining copies of even something as new as the Wii would be useable by then, and even with backwards compatibility of CD-based games, the games of today would still only be playable if their content was transfered either onto ISOs or a future equivalent of the Virtual Console.
However, to conclude this entry, the real tragedy that was explained by the disappearence of humanity wouldn't be the loss of individual legacies; it would be the loss of any evidence of intelligent life having ever existed on Earth. It was one thing that the dinosaurs were all killed off millions of years ago, because they weren't intelligent life forms like us humans. They couldn't leave anything behind for us to enjoy, save for their own biological remains. But despite what Dad said last night about us being pretty much trapped here, there are some people (myself included) who have faith that in the future, we might be able to artifically modify planets with things like oxygen plants. I do know that something like that would take some extreme scientific advances, but who 25 years ago would have known that the Internet would be possible, or that it would be possible to send someone to the Moon?