Epic Fail: The Fall of Civilization

A Bark Shield

Extinctions happen all the time. Civilizations fall into darkness and are forgotten. After a twenty thousand year Ice Age no one knows of the civilizations that towered above it all only to be ground down by wind, and rain, and war. No one knows of their stories, burned like kindling to cook a meal or stay warm in the cold. Sometimes we find them in the deserts formed by human occupation. Sometimes we find them deep under our feet. But in the end all that they were is lost to us in a way that is terrible and gut-wrenching. It is an Arson lit by Arsonists telling us that we have failed. We dont know the peoples of Sumer, or Gobleki Tepes. While we might pick through their trash, and read their correspondence, they are not yet us. And we are no longer them.
Pulling a shield of Bark from the earth in Scotland doesnt tell us about the Warrior who wielded it, or its maker. It doesnt tell us that her name was Maev and her ancestors were descended of the Kurgan Markuv family forced to flee west after their clan was marked for death by a rival. All we have is the discovery of the fragments of a shield of bark and if we are lucky, the capacity to understand how that shield was made. We certainly wont know that the yellow-painted squares and central dome represent the fields of onions going to flower confined by the long ditch encompassing a land-holding that she would never return to and a spartan shield that an ancestor wielded in battle in distant Greece. We wont know she lost six children to still-births and yet was never married.

Jade Message Cylinder

We do not know of her people, or her ancestry. Or that her Father held her and smiled at her birth, even though social pressures within the tribe demanded sons who would die in battle.

We can only read the intricate scratches in the stone cylinder and struggle to comprehend that they speak of a grain harvest burned because the comet in the sky has cursed every seed by its ungodly presence. We cannot know why they might believe that a chunk of ice and rock burning its way across the heavens required the destruction of the harvest that grew in the soil beneath it's passing, or that the stone it self was carved by hand of some long forgotten scribe skilled in writing and stone carving.

How could we be expected to assume that our beliefs are a lie that die with our civilization, and make haste to prepare great arks filled with an indestructible technology that will outlive the supernova of our star and the destruction of our planet, rather than as some safeguard that passes on the genetic legacy of who our people were without understanding that one might cause the loss of the other?