What Would Survive the Collapse of Our Civilisation?

If our civilisation were to collapse, and we were to enter into another dark age, what would remain after a few hundred years? What about a thousand? When we consider what remains of the ancient civilisations, it’s mainly stone monuments and scarce fragments. Material objects seem to stand the best chance of surviving, which is troublesome since, today, we live most of our lives online. All of that information, all of those archives… gone — like the library of Alexandria twenty-times over. As Frederick Campagna says in his book Prophetic Culture, we have entrusted the ‘treasure of our society’ to quite a fragile medium:

Delicate electronic hardware degrades fast, and its maintenance proves impossible without today’s hyper-complex system of extraction and supply. Digital content corrupts even faster, dragging out of existence the possibility that any echoes might remain of the world from which it sprung. When the material conditions keeping its hardware operative will have collapsed, the digital archives to which this civilization has entrusted its cultural legacy will also vanish. As soon as the storages of contemporary culture will be deprived of a seamless supply of rare metals, electricity and skilled labour-force, they will become inaccessible once and for all — as absent as if they had never existed. More fragile than the papyri of the ancient…