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PEOPLE IN HISTORY WERE SOooo SIMPLE -
THEY DIDN'T EVEN HAVE RADIO & TV!

I often hear people say something like this. BUT... How will people who live, say, 500 years after us know what we were like? ... or 1000 years? ... 2000 years? Simple - they'll use all the information we've stored on computers and digital discs, and videos and films, and books, and things.
	Oh no they won't! The computers made 15 years ago are now rare. The ones we make now can't read the discs they used - how many people do you know still using a Sinclair computer? ... or use 5-inch floppy discs?
I'm told that CD discs last up to about 15 years before they de-laminate... or fall to bits. - even assuming anyone's still got a CD player in 15 or 20 years' time.
	Video and audio tapes both lose their ability to keep the magnetic patterns which store the information.
		Paper starts to rot after a few years. Cheap paper is wearing out after 50.
The very best paper modern technology can produce apparently is going to be wearing out after 500 years. Apparently old newspapers used better paper than we do now. I have copies of newspapers from the 1800's in my room. Look at newspaper sheets from about twenty or so years ago next time you find them in an old drawer or something, and they're often falling to bits already. I have met 300-year-old paper still in quite good condition. So, when Parliament nowadays makes laws and wants them to be stored so they last, they're written on parchment or vellum - sheep or calf skin dried and cured, scraped very thin, and stretched out. This process was used by the monks who wrote over 1000 years ago. It's still the best way known to modern human kind to keep information so it won't rot away or fall to bits, (and it's all made in one factory in Newport Pagnell, near Milton Keynes).
If you get the chance, visit places like the British Museum where they have manuscripts of 1000 years ago, and see the bright colours and deep black of the ink they made, still preserved on vellum and parchment.
OR if you really want it to last, try carving it in stone. ... like the people of 1000, 2000, 3000 and more years ago!

AND SOMETHING ELSE...

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