Why 99% of Humanity Is Lost to Time
[Music] As the nukes dropped on every major city around the globe, everyone sought shelter, but there was nowhere to hide. In an instant, civilization as we knew it was destroyed. Every server, library, and entity that stored information about who we are, what we did, and how we lived was gone. Only a handful of children worldwide survived, all kept in the deepest bunkers we could find. No adults could make it. Everything about humanity before the blast would be lost entirely in around five generations.
Sure, there are tales, mysteries, and legends, but no historical record of life before the final World War. There's no way our descendants, thousands of years from now, can know who we were. The story might sound a little far-fetched, but the reality is, for all we know, this could have happened already. Maybe, except for the nuclear part, because no evidence suggests that man-made nuclear weapons existed before Oppenheimer; but the rest of it could be true. There’s so much we don't know about the history of our world and humans. At one point, we knew more until the fire. [Music]
In 48 BC, the Library of Alexandria, located in Alexandria in what is now Egypt, burned down. Historians estimate that at one point the library held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India, and other nations. Sadly, as the pages turned into ashes, the most significant assembly of information about the ancient world disappeared.
There are a lot of theories about who started the fire. Julius Caesar is one of the most routinely accused people. He was driving his soldiers into Egypt when an Egyptian fleet in Alexandria cut him off. Legend has it that Caesar's ships were outnumbered, so they set all the ships in the harbor on fire. This fire then spread and destroyed parts of the city, including the library.
Another theory blames the fire on one of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt. California, the story goes, that the scrolls were burned for fuel for thousands of hot baths in the city. But there's some skepticism about why a Muslim would burn Jewish-Christian texts since they’re also the holy texts in Islam. Most likely, it wasn't a dramatic fire that started in the harbor or an attempt to make fuel, but a series of events that happened over time to destroy the library, culminating in the fire.
But who burned it isn't the real question we have. What knowledge was in there that we missed out on is a better question. What insights did historians and philosophers have about humanity that we'll never know? These are the more essential questions, questions that we might never truly know the answer to.
Beyond the Library of Alexandria, what about all the information never written down in the first place? The reality is that most of human history has been lost to time, and as a result, so many people have come up with their own conclusions about what we were. But before discussing those, there are things we need to know about our past. Prehistoric humans might not have had tools like we do today, but what they had in abundance was a really good understanding of math and engineering. That's why structures like the Great Pyramid and the Library of Alexandria could exist in the first place.
Today, some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what our ancestors knew for free because they learned by interacting with these elements directly. This is why I recommend brilliant.org, the best place to learn STEM subjects. Brilliant’s courses are all equipped with interactive features, so you can learn not just the theory of these concepts, but how they work in the real world as well.
Each course is also customized to fit your skill level, so you can start learning whether you're a beginner or intermediate. And with thousands of lessons on everything from basic and advanced math to AI, and new lessons added every single month, there's something in here for everyone.
I just started the Exploring Data Visually course, and it has truly transformed how I see and interact with complex data and statistics. And not just that, but it's also helped me with these videos because I now know how to convey those numbers to you...