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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Showerthoughts
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It's not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.
For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer's existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, "he" probably didn't write both poems. It's far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.
We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc...) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the "original" trilogy, but there's no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.
I never said Homer authored the stories he wrote.
It's a collection yes, much like the national epic of my country, Finland. Those epics are still considered to be written by the person who actually... wrote them.
It doesn't matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we've not lost the context of the story.
In your argument, it's more like a 1000 years from now people would consider George Lucas to be the creator of the Mandalorian. It wouldn't be correct, but it wouldn't be too far off the mark, and most importantly, nothing important to the context of "what is a light saber" would have been lost.
The point is that writing hadn't even existed too long by the point that we managed to preserve stories to last until modern times.
Our current technology is undeniably far superior, and there are dedicated institutions and people who preserve important information, especially culture. Star Wars is undeniably a part of that.
There is pretty much no situation in which we'd lose the context of what a light saber is, except pretty much the destruction of the entire world, all media wiped out somehow (despite that meaning the destruction of literal nuclear bunkers) and the extinction of anyone who knows about Star Wars.
The scale of destruction would need to be such that humanity itself wouldn't survive it.
It's more than likely that Star Wars will outlive our species.
We literally did. We don't know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don't know when, only rough estimates.
For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.
If our civilization falls, there's no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.
We literally didn't.
The information that existed 3000 years ago is more or less the same as it was, except ours is better, because we have tve concepts of fact and fiction, and we know the Trojan Horse was a mythical wooden horse in a real historical war.
If you watched Band of Brothers 1000 years from now. They will still know that WWII was an actual war and that Band of Brothers was a dramatisation that was produced decades later. The difference would be that you'd also have access to the imdb from which you can read it's history.
Just like the Odyssey was written years after the Trojan War. Back then myths and reality weren't as distinct as they are today. That's why we still tell kids stories about humanlike animals acting this way or that. It's not that it's "not real", just because humanlike animals are fictional, as it still teaches real life lessons.
Just like the Trojan Horse might be symbolic for the Greeks outwitting Trojans.
Sure, yeah, people "see" a lightsaber... where? A toy? In the movie? So they've lost the understanding of what toys and movies are? I would really like to hear a short synopsis of the scenario in which you think this is plausible.