What if the entire internet gets reduced to a footnote?
What if the entire internet gets reduced to a footnote?
Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read "and the humans all talked into screens and used "hyper links" to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence."
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
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Are you not underestimating the decentralisation of the internet? We're talking about stuff that is everywhere, and being very deliberately archived and well-protected in tens, hundreds of thousands of dedicated areas around the globe.
Something like a giant meteor would probably be the best case for the internet staying permanently accessible - Meteor blows up a few thousand square miles, sunlight blockages + toxic gas kill off all/most of humanity in a couple years, and datacentres will probably be left relatively unscathed so pretty much the whole internet will be recoverable for at least a few thousand years. More protected archives may be recoverable for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
I think, short of a catastrophic event that covers the whole globe in a few feet of lava, significant amounts of the internet will live on in recoverable archives.
I think if the internet is ever to be turned into a footnote, it'll be by the impermanence of society - Eventually people will stop caring, move onto internet 2 and that's all it'll take for people to slow chuck out and demolish the data. But obviously, given the massive density of information storage, one dedicated archive is all it takes to mostly survive, it'll only take <100 hard drives, or tapes, to store everything everyone ever publicly wrote on the internet (assuming we can filter out the AI garbage). Videos, games, hi-res pictures etc. the archiver might have to be more picky.
Unfun
But yeah Idk, big solar flare/geomagnetic storm after human negligence? I just don't really trust the interweb to last I guess.idk how accurate it is; but i've heard that all that'd need to be done in the event of a solar flare would be turning off the power grid until it's done, and there'd be hours of warning
The problem with electromagnetic pulses, which a solar flare basically is, is that they induce voltage in (even otherwise inert) metal. I think turning off the grid before a flare would reduce damage because high voltage cables wouldn't have two sources of voltage to deal with, but wouldn't protect us from all damage. Most local distribution infrastructure and unshielded devices would get zapped beyond their capacity whatever you do.
A solar flare would take out a massive amount of electrical infrastructure, on one side of the globe anyway. But a large portion of datacentres are shielded because putting in a bit of extra wire is a pretty small cost for a big benefit. So a lot of power/comms infrastructure would need recreating, but again, most of the data is unlikely to be lost.
It only takes one archive.org-type datacentre to survive to restore everything of any significance, and there are a fair few of those around.
Boooooo!! Death to the internet!!