Andrew Wooldridge 🌱Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Laure@triptych nice story. He was a great scientist but imo books and writing were completely utilitarian ways to count, or art like writing down ancestral stories or cave art. Also every animal or plant can experience #epigenetics which is collective memory not to mention plants getting soil signals and communicating through rhizomes etc
LisPi@LaureM @triptych If you're wondering, this is what I'm referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
