Probably more like 99,999…%

Want to feel sadder? Humanity has existed on Earth in its current form for about 200,000 years.

We’ve only had civilization for about 10,000.

That means humans spent about 180,000 years throwing rocks, sticks, and presumably feces at each other in the dirt before we entertained the idea of working together for mutual benefit. With all of our present senses and capacities at our disposal.

Just incase anyone ever wonders why it’s so difficult for humanity to do what’s best for itself. We only do what’s in our best interests after we’ve fully exhausted all the bad options several times over.

They’re crying because of the comma

Here’s something even sadder. We only need history because human lives are so short.

The real problem we have now is that there is so much information, we cannot store it all. You can’t just throw things out either because you truly have no idea what seemingly worthless things we produce are going to be deemed of significant value later on.

That old blurry photograph of your great aunt with a photo bomb of some random dude? It is the only photo of the zodiac killer. That random shitty video in portrait mode of you driving through your home town in Kansas is the only surviving footage of what used to exist there before the 2046 asteroid impact that wiped out the state.

You just never know what truly matters until its gone.

And most of what was recorded is logistics and propaganda.

Sometimes, when hiking, I’ll see something incredible, and when I go to capture it in a photo, it just doesn’t come out the same.

Those vistas are allllll for me

And you are ultimately going to die as part of that 90% that won’t be remembered for anything at all no matter how big of a deal you view yourself in any form function or manner.

Me too. It won’t be so bad. Unless they check the hard drive. Oh buddy then we’re historically remembered. Like, that’s a lotta porn.

Anyone who has ever had to dig through an overly verbose log file is fine with this. 90% of what happens is tediously mundane.

Eh, I’m not sure as much is truly lost as one might currently think.

There’s a number of things that seem more like an issue of history as a field having challenges in undue influence of academic popularity contests and subspecialty isolation.

For example, the face of the historical basis for Helen of Troy has likely been on modern magazine covers, we just haven’t broadly realized it because most modern historians throw out Herodotus wholesale so they’ve ignored the details in his version of the Helen narrative, which happens to connect the events to part of Egypt’s history that’s been similarly poorly evaluated by scholarship to date.

Even the way Homer and the Trojan War narrative gets handled is pretty ass backwards, with scholars preferring to just hand wave it as mythological history rather than seeing it as having combined a history of the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia in the LBA with a later sea peoples capture of Wilusa back from the Hittites in the EIA (it has rather impressive levels of detail around events tied to both these things).

We see modern debates about whether the Exodus narrative occurred or not as described in the Bible but there’s very little investigation into the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the same which differ significantly from the Biblical version (notably about it being ethnocentric), even claiming the latter version was altered. Versions that might be quite relevant to recent archeological finds like the Aegean style pottery with local clay in Tel Dan or the imported bees from Anatolia in Tel Rehov.

Give it time. A lot of big topics that are generally dismissed or thought to be lost today might not still seem that way within a generation or two.

yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.

What’s more awful? Most of the history we know is biased in favour of the winners.

Life isn’t worth living just because it will be written down, so what if no one remembers, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it…[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us… The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians…the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians…the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us…as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”

Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)

In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.