Buzz
It’s widely known that humans aren’t great at taking care of our belongings. Losing a famous painting or a beloved movie is one thing, but losing the very things that hold our civilization together is something entirely different.
We’ve previously shared stories of the priceless cultural treasures and historical landmarks that we’ve somehow managed to misplace throughout history. But these losses are far more shocking.
10. Our Most Irreplaceable Audio Recordings
For most of human history, capturing and storing sound was simply impossible. Speeches, performances, songs, and accents vanished without a trace.
Then, in the late 19th century, we discovered how to preserve sounds for future generations. It was a groundbreaking achievement in human progress…and a perfect example of human folly. As soon as we figured out how to record important sounds, we started destroying them.
The first to disappear was music. In the early days of the phonograph industry, no one anticipated that the songs they were recording would one day be worth anything. Pioneering examples of American gospel music, jazz, folk, and blues were lost forever when recording companies destroyed the original masters and sold them as roofing material. Today, it’s estimated that over half of all recordings made in the first 23 years of American music have vanished.
Later artists suffered the same fate. Entire works by Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and George Gershwin were lost, along with hundreds of unique author readings, radio interviews, and historic speeches. We even managed to misplace a recording made by the crew of the Enola Gay at the moment they dropped the atom bomb—a crucial piece of history now gone forever.
9. The Last Two Decades of Scientific Data
Science relies on raw data. Without solid data to back up our findings, our conclusions are essentially meaningless. Yet, scientists aren’t particularly good at preserving this data. A 2013 study published in Current Biology revealed that the vast majority of raw data from experiments over the past two decades is now completely inaccessible.
The research team reviewed 516 papers published between 1991 and 2011. To their dismay, they discovered that 23 percent of the data from the most recent studies was missing or destroyed. Worse still, 90 percent of the raw data from the older papers was lost for good.
The issue lies with data stored online. When links break, websites are taken down, or email addresses become inactive, retrieving that data becomes impossible. In 25 percent of the studies, no contact emails could be found for the researchers. For another 38 percent, requests for raw data went unanswered. Other vital files were stored on outdated hardware. Smithsonian magazine reports that this data is now irretrievable.
The tragic part is that this data could still be useful to science, even years or decades later. In the 1980s, zoologist Timothy Vines was studying two species of toads from Eastern Europe. Thanks to raw data from a small Polish study published in 1930, he was able to make a significant discovery. If Vines were conducting that research today using studies from 1991, that breakthrough would never have happened.
8. Two Decades of Lost Supreme Court Citations
Supreme Court citations are to law what raw data is to science. They provide the context and details that help clarify the highest court’s decisions and set lasting precedents. Sadly, a large number of these citations are now gone for good.
Since 1996, the Supreme Court has referenced online materials 555 times. However, a 2013 study found that nearly 50 percent of the URLs included in those rulings now lead to dead ends. This includes citations in landmark cases like Scott v. Harris.
In 2001, sheriff’s deputy Timothy Scott was involved in a high-speed chase with 19-year-old Victor Harris, which ended with Harris being left paralyzed. Harris filed a lawsuit, claiming excessive force. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the decision was heavily influenced by an online video from Scott’s dashcam. Unfortunately, the link to that video is now broken, making it impossible to fully understand the court’s reasoning behind the verdict.
As Adam Liptak points out in The New York Times, this phenomenon of link rot has led to Supreme Court decisions being “increasingly built on sand.” In some cases, the cited materials now even undermine the court’s credibility. For instance, one 2011 citation related to violent video games now directs to a message that reads:
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this Web page? If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain to make a comment about the fleeting nature of linked information in the Internet age.”
7. Britain’s Lost Television Legacy
Despite its small size, Britain has had a monumental impact on global culture. Almost everyone has heard of Monty Python, Doctor Who, and the Beatles. A significant portion of this contribution came through television, which was long dominated by the BBC. However, due to a series of poor decisions made by the corporation in the 1960s and ’70s, much of Britain’s television history is now lost forever.
This includes, most famously, nearly 100 episodes from the early days of Doctor Who. But the losses don’t stop there. Bob Dylan’s first acting role (along with his initial televised performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind”) is missing, as well as work by Ridley Scott, playwright Dennis Potter, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.
A large portion of the groundbreaking sci-fi series The Quatermass Experiment, which transformed TV sci-fi, has been lost, as well as episodes from comedy classics like Dad’s Army and Hancock’s Half Hour. As shown in the video above, the Beatles’ sole appearance on the live music show Top of the Pops now exists with only 21 seconds of surviving footage, ironically preserved in a Doctor Who episode.
The blame lies with the BBC itself, which erased old tapes in an effort to save costs. However, things could have been much worse. At one point, the corporation actually considered erasing all of Monty Python’s work.
6. One-Third of All Bitcoins
Despite ongoing predictions of its downfall, there’s no denying that bitcoin has become a significant currency. In fact, an analysis by The Money Project ranked it as the best-performing currency in the world for 2015. Billions of dollars worth of coins are currently tied up in the project, making the stories of zombie coins all the more unbelievable.
Unlike traditional banks, bitcoins operate without any regulation. If you die without passing on your key (essentially a password), your coins are lost with you. The same happens if you lose your hard drive or experience a catastrophic failure. These bitcoins remain within the system but are effectively useless. These coins are referred to as zombie coins. According to a study by NVIDIA engineer John Ratcliff, they may now make up about 30 percent of all bitcoins in existence.
The value of bitcoin fluctuates so wildly that we won’t specify a figure here. However, when Ratcliff conducted his study, the value of the zombie coins was nearly $1 billion. Some of these coins were intentionally made inaccessible through a process called “burning” by shadowy groups. That’s $1 billion effectively lost forever—similar to a ship carrying Spanish gold sinking to the ocean floor.
5. One-Quarter of the World’s Language Families
The Indo-European language family includes a wide range of languages such as English, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Kurdish, and Nepali. Losing this language family would mean losing all the poetry, legends, novels, songs, and histories associated with each of these languages, along with hundreds more.
Throughout the course of human history, we haven’t experienced just one or two instances of loss like this, but over 100 times. A staggering number of language families—at least 100—have disappeared, along with all the individual languages within them. This amounts to nearly one-quarter of all language families that have ever existed.
Given the expansive timeline of human history, this might not seem like a monumental loss. However, there are signs that the rate of disappearance is speeding up. Of the 100 language families that have already been lost, 28 of them vanished just in the last century.
The rate of language extinction has been so intense that a language died out every three months. By the year 2100, it’s predicted that around 50 percent of the world’s 6,500 languages will be gone. Some projections are even more dire, estimating that 90 percent could be lost. That’s an immense cultural loss in just one century.
4. A Generation of Gaming History
Whether we like it or not, video gaming has firmly cemented its place in our culture, becoming just as integral to our civilization as music or television. It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that we’re already losing significant portions of it. While timeless classics like Space Invaders are safe for future generations, newer titles are slipping through the cracks, especially those that only exist on the web.
If you’ve ever played a niche MMO—such as Glitch or City of Heroes—you’re probably familiar with the following scenario: The game’s popularity wanes, and the company eventually shuts down the servers. This is a win for the company, but it’s a disaster for historians.
In the blink of an eye, a game that defined a generation can disappear without a trace. This isn’t too problematic while it’s still fresh in our memories. However, historians must think beyond the present. Two centuries from now, they might be sifting through our old blog posts and wondering about the significance of EVE Online or World of Warcraft.
Game updates pose a similar challenge. Take Farmville, for instance: Though it’s widely recognized as a major milestone, for better or worse, in how a generation engages with games, it’s not the same game it once was. Since 2009, Farmville has undergone so many updates that tracking its evolution is nearly impossible. Game historians are already warning that this could become a major issue in the coming decades.
3. Vital Skills
As technology continues to evolve, automation is taking over more and more of our daily tasks. Self-driving cars could become a common sight in the future. A recent survey also showed that nearly half of all young people are concerned that their jobs will be automated within the next 10 years.
In some respects, automation is a great thing. Self-driving cars could reduce accidents and fatalities. On the flip side, it could be a disaster. As more jobs are automated, we're losing the ability to perform even the most basic tasks ourselves.
Take the Igloolik Inuit tribe, for example. For centuries, their annual hunts depended on expert navigation skills passed down through generations. Then, GPS technology appeared, and the need to retain those skills vanished. Just a few years later, a significant increase in catastrophic hunting accidents was observed when hunters became lost after their GPS failed them.
A similar issue exists today with airline pilots. On most flights, a pilot only takes control of the plane for a brief three minutes. When the autopilot malfunctions, pilots who lack manual flying experience are often prone to making mistakes.
In 2009, a French pilot flying from Rio to Paris became disoriented when the autopilot switched off. Despite the warning alarms, he continued to slow the plane, causing it to plummet into the Atlantic Ocean, claiming the lives of all 228 passengers. Shortly after the tragedy, Rory Kay, a seasoned pilot and former safety chief of the Air Line Pilots Association, expressed concern that “we’re forgetting how to fly.”
If this trend continues, it may not be long before we resemble the humans in WALL-E—overwhelmed by the technology we depend on, yet unable to function without it.
2. 99 Percent Of Species
Throughout Earth's history, countless species have disappeared. Most of us can easily name a few: dinosaurs, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the woolly mammoth, and others. However, the true extent of these extinctions may be even more staggering than we realize. It's estimated that 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.
That already shocking number may soon rise even further. In 2015, a team of scientists published a study suggesting that Earth is currently undergoing a sixth mass extinction event. We've had these before, and they are never gentle. The most well-known was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
However, the mass extinction that eradicated the dinosaurs primarily eliminated the larger animals. The Permian-Triassic extinction was far more devastating, eliminating about 90 percent of the species alive at the time. If we face another extinction of this magnitude, our current 99 percent figure may soon swell to 99.9 percent.
Regardless of whether we are truly in the midst of another mass extinction, the staggering loss of species that has already occurred remains deeply tragic. The most heartbreaking are those species that vanished without leaving any trace in the fossil record.
1. Nearly All Our Food
Mass production revolutionized farming in terms of feeding the population, but it also brought significant harm to species diversity. Thanks to selective breeding practices, we've wiped out almost everything our ancestors once consumed.
Take apples, for example. They are a vital part of American culture, so much so that people still say ‘as American as apple pie’ instead of ‘as American as a Big Mac with extra fries.’ However, the apple pies your great-great-grandmother used to bake are vastly different from those you can make today. Over the past century, 86 percent of all apple varieties in the U.S. have been lost.
This loss has deeply affected regional cuisines. Choctaw hogs, Midget White turkeys, and American chestnuts were once common on local menus, but they are now gone forever. The global situation is equally grim, with roughly 75 percent of farmed plant diversity lost compared to pre-1900.
This lack of genetic variation leaves the surviving species vulnerable to diseases. Right now, a disease is on the verge of eliminating the common banana altogether.
