This is a little off-topic, but I was looking at news about the earthquake in Indonesia and I started wondering how a digital society like ours can leave a lasting record of itself.  As more and more of our information moves online, it very often doesn't even exist at all physically anymore, unless you count little magnets on hard drive platters.  I don't know about everyone else, but the only time I really print anything out anymore is when I need to sign it.  Otherwise I just use my laptop or Blackberry.

People used to write stuff on papyrus and engrave it in stone, that's the only  reason we have a record of what happened to them.  Even if we found an ancient hard drive, we wouldn't have operable hardware or the right operating systems and software to actually use or understand its contents.  And that's ignoring the fact that hard drives are extremely fragile in the first place.

Not that it would mean anything to us if it actually happened, but suppose an giant earthquake, tsunami, comet, and/or nuclear war wiped out the entire civilized world.  I wonder how much of our news, ideas, and history would actually survive in a way that was permanent enough for future archaeologists to dig it up and understand us from it.