When I was a kid, I thought that having to use encyclopedias & going to the library to research any given topic was a real pain in the ass. The Internet (despite the abundance of garbage & ridiculousness) has already clearly revolutionized the human race & is the catalyst for profound changes to our world.
Even for people my age and older who grew up without the capability of digital search engines, the almost magical ease of The Web is still easy to take for granted. The volume of knowledge (& stupidity) existing in the virtual realm is amazing, especially when you consider the rate at which it's increasing.
Despite all the effort and creativity that's gone into it, it's always possible that a natural or cosmic event could destroy mankind's digital archive- & everything else we've worked for- in an instant.
People are currently trying to ensure preservation of cultural artifacts like the Internet. However, it's possible that tens of thousands of years into the future, it will be something like the granite sculptures of Mount Rushmore that will have more of a lasting legacy than our virtual mountains of digital data.
On the other hand...
Maybe by that time in the future, mankind will have begun colonizing space with spacetime warp drive systems & we'll have a Galactic Internet among the stars, instantly connected through quantum entanglement.
Either way, I (probably) won't be around...
so it doesn't really matter.
:P
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