Ruins are a staple of fantasy writing. Ancient halls under the ground, dungeons which house dragons, crypts and tombs of untold riches. Built by long lost civilizations, abandoned, forgotten and waiting for bands of enterprising heroes to stumble through, slaughter the local fauna and cart off the treasures.

photo credit: Lauren Treece

And oh, what treasures they find. The artefacts of ancient civilizations are remarkably durable. Which, OK yes, it’s fantasy and they are literally magical things. But there is an interesting story to be extracted about a material culture that can disappear but leave behind works of enduring value that boot up and are useable right out of the crypt.

It’s a trick we haven’t learnt, and if current trends hold, we are unlikely to learn. Our stuff wears out, breaks down and often depends on a networked web of infrastructure to function at all. Consider Mammoth’s excellent preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes. Consider the gap in the digital record.

A modification of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law suggests itself. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic if it still works.