Star Wars City Doomed By Sand Dunes

An anonymous reader writes "The buildings and set of the fictional city Mos Espa are set to be swallowed by migrating sand dunes in the Tunisian desert. From the article: 'Ralph Lorenz, from Johns Hopkins University, US, together with Jason Barnes, from the University of Idaho, and Nabil Gasmi, of the University of Sousse, Tunisia, visited the Mos Espa site in 2009, and noted that part of a nearby set used in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope had already been overrun. Using satellite images of the site, they were able to determine the speed of dune movement, which is approaching the buildings once inhabited by such luminaries as Anakin, his slave owner Watto, and rival podracer Sebulba.'"

And then in a thousand years

[Anonymous Coward]

Archaeologists will study these homes, and come up with all sorts of explanations for their features or lack thereof.

Sand dunes caused by set?

[MatthiasF]

From the series of photos and shape of the dune, it seems like the set itself altered the wind pattern and caused the very same dune that is going to engulf it?

or watch the movie? more documents than people

[raymorris]

I wonder about future historians and archeologists.TThere are now more web pages than people. Several 24/7 news channels document everything in excruciating detail. Will people in the future wonder about anything that happened in the 21st century, or will they merely need to decide which stories are interesting enough to tell in history books?

With the technologies Facebook is developing and knowledge graphs being pioneered for Google Now, will historians of the future even need to compile narratives, or will Google 3000 interpret the database and narrate the story in real time when you query it? "Siri, tell me about my great-great-great-grandfather."

Re:or watch the movie? more documents than people

[osu-neko]

Yeah, the latter is more likely. In the far future, the start of the information age will be considering the effective start of history. Knowledge of events prior to the 21st century will be considered semi-mythical, due to the fact that they weren't recorded at the time and all we have are essentially second hand accounts recorded in files with timestamps from the 21st or late 20th century at the very earliest. They'll (correctly) consider any "historical" texts of time before that as the theories and opinions on history given by later scholars, whereas from the 21st century forward they'll have actual historical records, rather than speculation.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood has left a lot of its garbage lying around over the years. Something I stumbled on this morning was a YouTube video of a guy visiting the site where they filmed the train/bus crash & derailment scene from the 1993 version of The Fugitive. The locomotives and remains of the bus were just shoved off to the side and have been left sitting there for 20 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvizgSKTaVE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJWdMm8J0lc

Re:Why was the set left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was the set left in the desert? Was the film crew asked to leave it, or could they just be bothered to spend money removing their trash when they were finished shooting?

Because it is a tourist attraction and brings money to the area.

Re:And then in a thousand years

[phantomfive]

Based on the movement of the dune, it looks like it will pass over and within decades the city will be uncovered again.

Re:or watch the movie? more documents than people

[Anonymous Coward]

That's outright bullshit and I can't see how it got modded up with anything besides funny.

It's going to be the complete opposite. There's going to be a gap in history of things lost due to unreadable formats and hardware failures where the data isn't even there to read, and that's not even counting things like DRM and data in the cloud that just gets deleted when the company fucks up or closes. The loss is can already be experienced daily, and it can pretty much only get worse.