“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”

“I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”

“That is fine when you are talking about comets.” “I’ll not discuss religion, then.”

-Neal Stephenson “Quicksilver”

Times change and we change with the times. As Sir Harold Kroto said, he used to know every little detail about the process of taking a photo, as he carried each step out himself. Nowadays we only press a button and everything is done for us, we are not intimately aware of the process. Due to the rise of digital technology, we no longer know ‘how’ things work. Sure, there are commands and electrical signals and capacitors… but we don’t know the underlying architecture nor the algorithms built on it. Often enough we don’t even know whether the thing we are using, may it be a car, a computer, or a speaker system, uses actual programmed commands to carry out its function or simple signals are enough. We no longer need to.

But a lot of magic is lost in the process. You know what I mean – the reason you’d rather read a book instead of watching a movie about it requiring less time, the reason you’d rather go see a live show than listen to a studio recording with superior quality, why you’d rather go sunbathing than visit a solarium. The experience is different. Hell, if I could, I’d use a dedicated writing station for satisfying creative juices. Innovation is crucial and pretty much everyone enjoys it. They enable us to have new experiences while locking away our old ones. This is the purpose the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, DOSBox and many others exist, to give us access to those old memories and experiences. But as much as one can try, some things simply disappear. Until we are surprised to see them once again.