This reminds me of how the British Navy forgot the cure to scurvy after 150 years. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

It's interesting how sometimes an article seems ridiculous at first but quickly becomes extremely interesting... This was one of those.

Like when Romans invented the scalpel forgotten only to be reinvented in the 19th century (stretching a bit since IIRC the Arab kept using it) ?

That a subject that never cease to amaze me. Civilizations rises and fall and with them knowledge. To me, Dan Simmons kind of use that in Ilium and Olympos as background. What will happen when our digital civilisation falls ?

We can never 'fall' again as thoroughly as we did in the past. Too many artifacts; too many documents/cds/books/computers containing the technology to restart a civilization.

Books fall apart (especially those made in recent times). Computers, cds etc all require electricity, which would probably be one of the first things to go, taking with it reams of digital information. Then account for lack of maintenance (except in isolated environments) and within a century or two, it would be very difficult to recover from.

Exactly. Even though we have a many more means of storage today than we did in antiquity, they're brittle in innumerable ways. The only sort of "permanent" storage would be in the form of a hologram (if the media is durable), however without technology to read it, that's still a gamble.

This is why messages for nuclear waste disposal sites are meant to transcend not only modern media, but also modern language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Mes...

‘Documentation’ was not always as cheap as it is today. If it takes hours to engrave a few words in a stone board or if a single page of paper is worth more than a simple meal, you think twice about what you ‘document’. Chances are that such common practices were considered that obvious that they didn’t need documentation on their own, similarly how you would likely not include ‘plug the computer into a power supply’ when asked to tell a relative how to set up theirs.

Why document something that everyone does? History is captured in sources like published news, government statistics, personal letters, etc. A personal behavior that is widely understood would not necessarily be newsworthy enough to capture in any of those places.

This is a real problem for historians: unusual occurrences are usually well-documented in permanent media; everyday life usually is not.