[jlawson]

I think English would be fine.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.

[philipov]

That's fair, English is probably fine. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me all our massive data centers are going to survive. I don't think that will even require a civilizational collapse, just a company going out of business. Imagine what a full-scale depression would do. And the drive to push everything into the cloud has only gotten started. Just look what happened with Tumblr banning adult content and blocking people from making archives. It's already getting difficult to find hardware that can read old media, and the attacks on public library funding don't help either. We're building a Tower of Babel and storing all our knowledge inside.

[jacobush]

Yeah, but data is like... we could loose 99% of it and be just fine. With the remaining 1% the most important tech/science knowledge and a fair chunk of culture could be interpolated.