I was fascinated—and he just as much—with the idea that the future might be one in which we had lost all our technical prowess, just as, after the fall of the Roman Empire, almost every innovation of technology, medicine, science, mathematics, and literature was lost. For the better part of the next thousand years, only scraps of the old knowledge survived, hidden in monasteries or preserved in translations into Arabic. The worst loss of all was the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria, which housed the entire store of antique knowledge and literature and philosophy.
