Our society has managed to write down some things like math for example so our knowledge as species won't be lost if mathematicians suddenly died. But it's harder to find permanent storage for the more skills based human activities like the woodworking you mention.
To give another example, the Saturn V rockets were built by a generation of metalworkers who had honed their skills in the manufacturing plants of world war 2. The plans for the rocket engines are still preserved but back then a plan was just a rough guideline. In the details, each single engine was hand-tailored to the individual rocket. Nowadays, stuff is far more automated and plans are highly precise. Thus Nasa couldn't just get the plans out of the cabinet and build new Saturn V rockets or even just put their engines into new rockets.
I wonder if we are better in preserving our heritage than we used to be. Which information about the manufacturing process of one of today's cars will be usable in 100 years? Will they be able to build computer chips like we did?
Skills like hand fabrication and fitting aren't something that you can store. You can record videos or interview skilled tradesmen as much as you want, but the real skill is something that is learned through experience, it's muscle memory and intuition, not theoretical knowledge.
It was quite natural to think of enhancing the successful Ariane 4 design instead of building Ariane 5. From the conversations I remember from that time this was not considered a viable path - mostly because the supply chain of the Ariane 4 parts had already gone dry and it was not considered realistic to rebuild them.
For me as a young engineer this was very surprising, but a few years later I understood two things much better:
1. The knowledge to build projects of this scale is very distributed. There were subcontractors over subcontractors (spread over several countries) and every one had some tacit knowledge viable for the project.
2. Setup cost for parts production is relevant, even for the small series productions common in aerospace.
Hardcovers from the 19th century are pretty common. Tons of low-value ones (textbooks, fiction by at-the-time very popular authors who've been forgotten) floating around at a couple dollars a piece in flea markets here in the US, and I bet even older books are somewhat common in Europe. Lots by famous authors but of course those are usually more expensive. Most of those weren't finely-printed on modern archival paper or anything like that, and haven't been kept in archival conditions, but often have a few years of hard-reading life left in them (and much more well-shelved), so 150-200 years is a fairly easy age to achieve for gently-read hardbacks using cheap (but not the very cheapest) materials. Maybe more if you re-bind them once or twice, or they're very rarely read.
That's without even getting into really nice material and binding, or very expensive non-paper for the pages if you're very serious about keeping a book in good shape for centuries. Not even tape comes close—we don't have a really good archival format for digital stuff yet, let alone one that normal people may have a bunch of in their houses (like books). Maybe one of the several long-lived storage formats under development will take off one of these days and our digital storage will get a bit less risky. Right now it's pretty bad, only saved by being extremely cheap compared to other options.
But even so, I think it's clear that with more broad documentation, we are in a better position to pick up the expertise of the past.
So in the future, all the wonderful, nutty youtubers that keep alive old arts and give demos would be especially invaluable. Not just in clarifying specific techniques and knowledge, but by demonstrating a general approach to problems that existed at the current time.
I've been watching all sorts of things the past couple of months like this: People making vacuum tubes, repairing vacuum tube equipment, older mainframe technologies like ancient versions of MVS, machining parts on equipment from the '30's.
None of it is how-things-are-done in a cutting edge factory or step by step directions on how to reproduce an important cultural artifact, but from the perspective of future people, it will be a valuable aid to gathering that context.
One I'm particularly reminded of is Clickspring on youtube who is building an antikythera mechanism. Even though we have the partial artifact, so little is known concerning metal working technologies of the time that it seems to be an anachronism completely alien to its time of origin.
His approach is to explore what technologies would make sense to a working craftsman of any era (which also could be surmised to have existed in the era). It's interesting to watch and it has apparently born fruit in terms discovering academically important information about the device.
Archive the channels you care about - they might otherwise be impossible to find in a few decades, or a few years. Youtube-dl is one of my favorite pieces of software.
Digital artefacts could be, paradoxically, less durable going in the future - if you write and publish a physical book, it might get forgotten in a library somewhere and rediscovered 200 years after you die.
If you publish an ebook on your website and die and no one cares, the probability of anyone discovering it by happenstance 200 years later goes down to 0.
Certainly, we can and should individually archive what's important to us, but more generally (archiving information for the next 1000 years say), I dunno. I hope someone will figure it out.
This seems overly pessimistic given the existence of archive.org (they accept donations!).
If archival institutions keep existing and improving their search and accessibility, it seems very possible that random websites will be accessible for a long time to come; 200 years is definitely within the realm of feasibility.
[EDIT:] maybe this: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
Losing knowledge like this was much easier in earlier eras when fewer people were literate. Trade knowledge would be passed down via apprenticeships and rarely written down. So it only takes one generation of the apprenticeship system breaking down for the knowledge to be lost entirely.
(Also, for anybody unfamiliar with r/AskHistorians, it's one of the best corners of the internet! Professional historians provide in-depth answers to random questions about history.)
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gntlr8/how_d...
The thing is, there are many aspects to doing things which can’t be written down. So even today, the one generation concept is meaningful. There is a deep “use it or lose it” spirit in biological systems. We might think of ourselves in primarily literate/rational terms, but that’s far from the truth.
"Sorry, we lost all knowledge of how to build those during the great content-id wars of 2029."
I wonder whether that's not really more the exception rather than the rule - some famous cathedrals just took a long time. But lots of huge projects were completed in one or two decades or less - the pyramids, the Coliseum, the Taj Mahal, the Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, etc.
That's mind-boggling. Why would building a cathedral/mosque/temple take longer than a lifetime (or half)?
Even pre-industrial London could crank out enough churches in a dozen years to keep a celebrated architect booked solid. But that’s an exceedingly dense urban era, capable of supporting a large array of skilled labor.
There's also likely an element of not really wanting it to be done since the construction itself is a big part of the draw of the building for tourism.
When you see it, the timeline starts to make sense.
Furthermore cathedrals were often build iteratively - e.g. someone finances a new tower to add to an existing centuries old building.
1. It's easy to underestimate what is possible when you limit thinking to a short timescale. I think of the cathedrals, temples, mosques, etc. that have been built all over the world, where the people who started the work knew they wouldn't live to see it finished, but that didn't dissuade them.
Or conversely, it's easy to overestimate the difficulty of something if you are too constrained by thinking in terms of finishing it relatively quickly.
2. Building things does make it easier to build things - and conversely, not building things makes it harder. There is a lot of architectural stuff in our world today, particularly fine masonry and woodwork, that is still common because so much of it was made up through the 1930's or so, but which is actually quite difficult to produce today because most of the skilled labor and the industry that supported it is gone.
This also reminded me of an article about scientific glasswork, which is similarly dying out[1], and of course more familiar to the HN crowd we know about old technology that was once common and now is difficult to replicate or maintain.
Lots to think about.
1: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb...