Memories of lost wondrous things

Book says most human knowledge lost

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WE like to celebrate ideas and innovation and solutions here at the Right Stuff.

But what if many of the problems we are trying to solve were fixed before. And we just forgot.

Imagine standing atop the ruins of a once-great city, pondering not what once stood there but everything we'll never know about it.

In Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge, Jack R. Bialik invites us to do just that.

His provocative idea: only 1.6% of all human knowledge has survived.

The rest? Lost to the winds of time, erased by war, disaster, or the indifference of generations gone by.

Bialik's book isn't a mournful elegy for what's lost but a rallying cry to recognise the fragility of what we know.

Drawing on wide-ranging research, he sifts through the ashes of past civilisations and emerges with tales that are by turns astonishing, infuriating and deeply moving.