It turns out that something has been watching the Earth in minute detail since before the solar system was formed, down to a sub molecular level. It can give you the answers to any historical questions, but not things like what someone was thinking or feeling.

All the world’s problems have been solved, and the information is only used with the strictest privacy, e.g. you can only get information on living people with their permission, or if you’re a member of law enforcement solving a crime.

The question is, if you have a hobby, job, or other reason to research the past, like being a geologist or genealogist, would you take the answers, or would you prefer to do the research yourself?

  • @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    164 months ago

    For sure! History is the scientific study of the past using all available evidence. If new evidence showed up, we should absolutely use it.

    Take the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a huge cache of texts, many over 2000 years old, containing biblical texts and fragments. The Vatican tried to buy up and conceal them, thinking that they might contradict existing manuscripts. They only let approved researchers have very limited access.

    To help the research, some of the scholars created a concordance - basically a list of words and how many times each appeared. A copy was leaked. It became the world’s largest Wordle puzzle and some scholars were able to essentially reverse engineer it into the original text. They published the results, even identifying some of the speculated variants. It was so accurate that the Vatican ended up releasing the original scrolls for study. There was no longer a point to concealing it.

    Although the discovery was tremendous for the field, it didn’t end up ruining anyone’s religion. It just offered new insights into the composition and development of the Bible. Pretty cool.