We'll never know how much was lost there, how many breakthroughs were forgotten and had to be rediscovered centuries later. That's before we even consider the impact on art and culture, on philosophy, on academics in general. How many ancient works only exist as fragments now, or even just allusions in other fragmentary works? Perhaps the greatest opportunity of our vaunted Information Age is to thoroughly and compactly preserve the sum of human learning in multiple durable forms. Obviously much of that is contingent on being able to access the data, but as long as there's a working piece of hardware with the data stored and a source of electricity it won't be lost. The downside, of course: Internet spam.