One thing that amazes me about modern society is how fragile it is. You look at these robust data centers, these feats of incredible genius... and you realize that if we ever run out of energy, or there is a massive catastrophe, or if we suffer a collapse like the Roman empire... people 1,000 years from now will have no clue what our civilization was like.

All those harddrives, tapes, and pipes. All of that collective knowledge will simply erode away. In a matter of years the data will become unreadable, in a few decades people would forget how to pull usable data off of storage mediums if any still existed.

Given a century or two... virtually everything except the plastic would just corrode away.

Even our buildings won't stand the test of time. Unlike solid stone construction, the rebar and reinforcements that make our structures safer will swell and corrode and collapse everything the modern world has ever made.

A 1,000 years after a collapse... everything that wasn't written own and carefully passed down generation to generation would simply be forgotten.

People would tell tales of great things. Giant structures that flew into the sky and perched in the heavens. Manmade towers that went up nearly a kilometer, ribbons of highway that connected entire continents. And nobody would know how much of it was really true.