Quote from: flyingmice;356613Ur and Babylon were lost because their locations were not plugged into a massively redundant and widespread database. Human memory is far to capricious to be depended on in such matters.

There nothing magical about high technology that makes it suitable for preserving knowledge over millenniums. It societal and culture changes that causes knowledge to be lost not the medium. It is lost because enough people cease to care about preservation.

Quote from: kregmosier;356624Battlestar Galactica?

Indeed, oh and Firefly, and perhaps Hitchhikers as well.

And the method of expansion from earth woudl need to be touched on.

I could see a situation where a high tech race took humans from earth to seed a planet/act as slaves/for fun/for deviant sexual purposes and those humans liberated themselves overcame their oppressors and set up a new civilisation. In some ways this is the BSG model as the Final Five led the exodus and so the humans were not fully savvy on the mechanics of the process.

I could also see a vast diaspora of relatively low tech ships from Earth to avoid some disaster resulting in separate cultures developing and some of those might hold no record of how they travelled and indeed might loose a lot of the tech that got them there if the single ship got damaged or whatever.

Quote from: estar;356625There nothing magical about high technology that makes it suitable for preserving knowledge over millenniums. It societal and culture changes that causes knowledge to be lost not the medium. It is lost because enough people cease to care about preservation.

If you are navigating space, this data is going to be preserved - because it's navigational data - unless all societies using this knowledge simultaneously regress to a point where navigational data is no longer important and cannot be maintained. Given the immensity of that disaster, preserving the location of Earth is the least of their worries. I'd be shocked if they remembered earth at all.

-clash

Quote from: estar;356625There nothing magical about high technology that makes it suitable for preserving knowledge over millenniums. It societal and culture changes that causes knowledge to be lost not the medium. It is lost because enough people cease to care about preservation.

Interestingly enough there is an outlandish theory that the data was thus stored and that the database was called speach and that the technology was called writing

Quote from: jibbajibba;356629Interestingly enough there is an outlandish theory that the data was thus stored and that the database was called speach and that the technology was called writing

At least as interesting is the fact that there were languages and writing systems in our (relatively recent) past that are currently undeciphered. There are probably a hundred times more that are undiscovered.

Quote from: jibbajibba;356627I could see a situation where a high tech race took humans from earth to seed a planet/act as slaves/for fun/for deviant sexual purposes and those humans liberated themselves overcame their oppressors and set up a new civilisation. In some ways this is the BSG model as the Final Five led the exodus and so the humans were not fully savvy on the mechanics of the process.

I could also see a vast diaspora of relatively low tech ships from Earth to avoid some disaster resulting in separate cultures developing and some of those might hold no record of how they travelled and indeed might loose a lot of the tech that got them there if the single ship got damaged or whatever.

Both of these situations happened in StarCluster, but the second group never lost where earth was - the first group never knew - even though it was destroyed. Muslims still pray toward where Mecca was.

-clash

There's a disjunct here that's worth resolving.

If we're asking "is there a story in which Earth is lost that can be credibly sold to an audience" then I think the answer is obviously "Yes". We can invent a way that that might happen -- a set of criteria that would allow it and that are plausible.

If we're asking "does it seem likely that in a  hundred thousand years there will be a galaxy-spanning empire of humanity that has forgotten Earth, as an extrapolation of what we know now" then the answer is probably "No, because the galaxy-spanning empire is already pretty unlikely and a half."

The second question is the least interesting (or perhaps the most) because it relies on an enormous number of unstated and vague personal premises. It boils down to "I think this". We can just state our thinks and be done. A poll would suffice.

The first, however, is soluble. We can explore the criteria that would allow that to happen and maybe even wind up manufacturing interesting (and useful, for those of us that play RPGs) settings in which it is true. Many different settings, maybe. We could get tools out of this.

Quote from: Halfjack;356633The first, however, is soluble. We can explore the criteria that would allow that to happen and maybe even wind up manufacturing interesting (and useful, for those of us that play RPGs) settings in which it is true. Many different settings, maybe. We could get tools out of this.

Actually, Pundit asked if it were credible, not if it were possible. Anything is possible, but to be credible, it needs to be likely enough that one can give credit to the story. One can make the possible credible by giving conditions which are not outlandish that would permit such a thing. One way is the retention of navigational data only by a select few, as in the Guild Navigators scenario mentioned above. That would work for me. Another is losing the gate access while retaining the astronomical location also mentioned above. That's credible too. If the particular scenario is true, then the concept becomes much more likely.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;356628If you are navigating space, this data is going to be preserved - because it's navigational data - unless all societies using this knowledge simultaneously regress to a point where navigational data is no longer important and cannot be maintained. Given the immensity of that disaster, preserving the location of Earth is the least of their worries. I'd be shocked if they remembered earth at all.

It seems to me the opposite is quite likely.  Technology may easily advance to the point that you don't need to rely on thousands of years old data in order to navigate.  i.e. If your navigation data is all lost, you just have to push a button and a few hours later you again have a complete and accurate star charts of the galaxy.  

I agree with the prior poster that information isn't lost due to technological failure.  After all, there is still plenty of cuneiform writing from Babylon that survives to the present day.  Information is lost because of lack of will to keep it organized and accessible.

If technology progresses it becomes illogical that earth's location is lost.   If technology were to some how regress after a point like in Warhammer 40k it's conceivable that the location of earth could be lost to a core body.

A more likely possibility is that some stigma gets attached to Earth due to some even so that it's name is stricken from the books and just becomes planet 57.  Some where some lone computer in the pope's office may know that planet 57 is really earth but 50,000 years of that information being stricken from the general database would effectively lose it.  1,000 years would likely do it as well.

Of course another stock sci-fi one would be a galactic incident that causes the actual location of earth to change and it's no location lost.  Massive dimensional sucking black hole or something equally sci-fi.

There is a modern example of data being irretrievably lost - data tapes from the Apollo missions stored by NASA that were improperly stored and/or the machines that could read them have long since been scrapped.

Not saying that would necessarily happen with data about where Earth is; just pointing out that technology is fine as far as it goes - its the people you need to worry about.

Quote from: flyingmice;356638Actually, Pundit asked if it were credible, not if it were possible.

-clash

In a 100,000 year time frame it is credible. Likely in reality? I doubt it. I think some sort of technological singularity would occur well before then that make our guess as useless as the speculation of a neolithic farmer would be make about what things would be like 10,000 years in the future.

I would say if you are creating a 100,000 history to make a RPG that approachable by the average gamers, Dark ages would have to be part of it to make it plausible. 10,000 years would be enough to make a couple of dark ages credible.

But absence dark ages then I don't see how anything can be lost in the future. Humanity will always be diverse enough so that somebody cares and the technology available to the individual sufficient enough to maintain and disseminate information to a wide audience.

Clash has a point about navigational data and that the location of Earth. It not like we are trying to preserve the music of the fourth most popular grunge band from early 90's Seattle. The topic is of wide enough interest that absence a dark age or a catastrophe it will be preserved.

You could have an interesting scenario where it's intentionally lost.

A colony encounters aliens, and gets into a war.  Fearful that they'll lose, and that the aliens will carry on after destroying them, they erase all records relating to the location of the home world.

They do lose, but they're not entirely destroyed.  Later, they rebuild and go back into space, but the records are gone, and knowledge of Earth's location with it.

Quote from: estar;356647Clash has a point about navigational data and that the location of Earth. It not like we are trying to preserve the music of the fourth most popular grunge band from early 90's Seattle. The topic is of wide enough interest that absence a dark age or a catastrophe it will be preserved.

Well, we being of Earth, of course we'd feel that we're important - and we'd like to imagine that we'll always be important.  However, I don't think that's a given.  In a hundred thousand years, it could be that humanity as a whole is only a minor species within the set of galactic inhabitants - and the exact location of its homeworld is no more important than the debate by the Akhvakhs over where their ancient capital was ten thousand years ago.  

Moreover, it's not enough for information to be technically preserved in some way - it needs to be not just accessible, but authenticated and validated by some source.  Just a few rounds of revisionist history is enough to put the question in doubt, and the digital age seems to be excellent at generating revisionist histories.

Quote from: jibbajibba;356627Indeed, oh and Firefly, and perhaps Hitchhikers as well.

And the Foundation series. Specifically, Foundation and Earth. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.