Trim the historical record to a manageable size by applying the same pruning algorithm used by Apple’s “Time Machine” backups.

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Background:

Ever since the invention of writing, the amount of recorded history has more-or-less steadily increased.

The Issue:

Over time, events accumulate that were once noteworthy, but are now just kind of a random historical footnote (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Here’s an example of a historical item that was perhaps once relevant—a shaman encountering a talking crocodile in 250 A.D.—but is unlikely to be worth great scrutiny in the modern era.

This problem just gets worse and worse over time! How do we prevent history books from getting “overloaded” with extraneous information?

Proposal:

The solution to this is simple: we do the same “trimming” of historical events that is done with certain  computer backups (e.g. Apple’s “Time Machine”), where recent files are kept daily, but older files are only snapshotted weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

Applying this technique to the historical record, we might retain historical information of the last 100 years at a high resolution, but as we go back in time, we’ll only pick up the highlights from each decade, then century, then millennium, etc. (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: “Compressed history” solves the problem of filling the historical record with too much minutiae.

Applying this technique to the historical record, we might retain historical information of the last 100 years at a high resolution, but as we go back in time, we’ll only pick up the highlights from each decade, then century, then millennium, etc. (Figure 2).

For example, a scholar in Rome in the year 200 A.D. might have a thorough knowledge of the exact sequence of Roman emperors in the preceding years, but a history book now might just say “Rome: it was an empire, I guess? Anyway it was a long time ago.”

Conclusion:

As historical events become better-recorded and better-preserved due to modern technology, we should formalize the process of “trimming” history to a reasonable level of detail!

PROS: Prevents history books from becoming 100,000 pages long.

CONS: Might lose important details if the history-trimming algorithm isn’t tuned properly.