From what I understand, a lot of knowledge was lost following the collapse of the Roman Empire as manuscripts were no longer being copied at the established frequency and information that had lost relevance (for certain jobs etc.) wasn’t being passed down.
If a catastrophic event were to happen nowadays, how much information would we theoretically lose? Is the knowledge of the world, stored digitally or on printed books, safer than it was before?
All the information online for example - does that have a greater chance of surviving millennia than say a preserved manuscript?
An event today equivalent to the collapse of the Roman Empire could very well trigger a nuclear war.
Nuclear weapons create electromagnet pulses (EMPs) that will wipe every every magnetic storage device, and destroy every semiconductor, that isn’t hardened or shielded. Which means the only computers that will survive are those made from specific EMP resistant semiconductors (gallium arsenide usually) used for military applications, or stored in a faraday cage.
Books will fare better than historically, mostly because of the sheer volume of them we have. Unfortunately the least useful books will be the ones with the best chance of surviving, there’s millions of copies of 50 shades of grey, so that will almost certainly survive, on the other hand there’s probably only a few thousand copies of obscure textbooks on things like building steam engines we will need to rebuild society.
EMP really doesn’t affect nearly as much as we’ve been lead to believe.
A direct lightning bolt to a car (millions of volts), doesn’t destroy the ECM - a car will start right up afterwards.
An EMP is a magnetic field - an impacted device must attenuate that field (i.e. act like an antenna) to generate an electrical pulse on it’s circuits. Plus the energy of any field dissipates as a square of the distance. Trying to get millions of volts into a device via magnetic pulse is a serious challenge.