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Copyright is an attempt to bridge the infinitely scarce with the infinitely plenty. If it didn't exist then some of the greatest writers would have had to keep day jobs in order to stay alive and thus could not have put nearly as much effort into their work. We wouldn't have most sci-fi films because the cost of doing them would be prohibitive. It goes on.

While I agree with the limited monopoly copyrights and patents afford to creators, I used to write and still photograph, to say nothing would be written if not for copyright and nothing invented if not for patents is to ignore the vast majority of human history. When Shakespear wrote his plays he didn't have copyrights, nor did Chaucer when he wrote "Tale of Two Cities". Copyrights didn't exist when Gilgamesh , the oldest known written story, was written. Ancient Greece, Athens, was known for it's arts however Athenians didn't enjoy copyrights.

Yeah, that's why we don't have any idea what anybody might have said (or meant) more than a thousand years ago.

Indeed. Think about non-computer works from the ages.

Take Shakespeare - the standard editions have their spelling fixed, and there are many editions paraphrased into modern English.

Take Dante - the Italian he used, though it practically created the language, is most definitely not the common modern vernacular. Or as another example, I know modern, standard French pretty well. With some effort I can read Le Petit Prince (1943), but it's not enjoyable. I can kinda get the gist of Les Miserables (1862). I looked at the original Song of Roland (11th century) once and the only words I recognized were stupid stuff like "le" and "est" (and I think even those weren't in their modern forms) - the vocabulary looked very different. But these works are still read today; they aren't lost.

Take Beowulf, which was written in English. I'm assuming everyone here knows English. But "Beowulf is min nama" (Beowulf is my name) may be the limit for modern English speakers trying to read it. Can you understand (without cheating) the meaning of "his modsefa manegum gecyðed, wig ond wisdom"? And even though there's only one manuscript, and that bound, burned, rebound, and now missing letters, we still have modern versions, and the manuscript remains as intact as possible in the British Museum.

What about The Epic of Gilgamesh? The thing is carved in a Sumerian stone tablet, yet there are translations today.

If words on stone tablets from three or four millennia ago by people who didn't even suspect forward-compatibility problems is still readable as an e-text, I'm fairly sure there will be a mechanism to get important files back in 50 years. There will be some important material that will be continually transfered to more modern materials - think of the US Constitution, which was written on sheepskin, afterwards published in books of the period, and now available on the Internet. Of course, not everything will be saved, just as Shakespeare's doodles from age eight haven't been recovered. But just as we can analyze parchment and stone tablets, people will analyze CDs - even deteriorated ones - so long as the content is sufficiently important. Just as always.

Check out "Gilgamesh" if you want to know about the origins of the Bible. Relatively recent translation and merging of different fragments have given us a much clearer view of this ancient, epic story.

I'd like to take small exception to your assumptions about flooding in the area. Non-literialist biblical researchers had long thought that flooding in Mesopotamia led to the story of the Flood, as a major flood is recorded in the Summerian Epic Of Gilgamesh. More recently, a case has been made that the flooding of the Black Sea basin, which previously held a smaller fresh water lake, would have provided the seed for the story.

Compare this localized 1000 foot (300m) flood with the 17000 foot (5000m) global flood posited by the biblical story. Now, before someone lays into me for discounting the power of the Lord, consider how scientific research approaches this.

1. make observations of nature.

2. based on those observations, make an informed guess about why something came to be what was observed.

3. develop series of tests that might support your assertion, tests that other people can make independently.

4. collate data collected from many such tests, and see if the results support the theory.

For a localized Black Sea flood, there is previously collected evidence that due to the end of the last ice age, ice sheet melt flooded the eastern Med area, and what is now the Bosporus strait was breached about 7000 years ago. Salt water added 300m to the level of the Black Sea within a matter of months, drowning hundreds of square miles of land. Recent archeological dives along this now submerged land seem to show paleolithic human settlements. Further research is needed before strong conclusions can be drawn.

For a global 5000m+ flood, the very first thing we need to account for is the lack of suitable debris that would have washed ashore at high elevations as the waters subsided. If the Ark survived, some of the other wood left floating around might be expected to. The next thing would be to account for the volume of the ocean being doubled, and then halved, all in the course of a few months. Where did it come from, and where did it go?

As a biblical literalist, if your answer is basically that the Lord gave, and the Lord took away, then you've provided faith as evidence. While one's faith can be tested, it can't be independently checked and verified. The scientific method of investigating the works of the Lord assumes - baring evidence to the contrary - that the Lord maintains His creation in a consistent state: hot air rises, the sun sets, gravity sucks. If He doesn't, then the method will need to adjust.

So far, however, the method has proved useful at measuring the nature of Nature, such that we can reliably do things based on many of the conclusions we've drawn so far.

Sigh. Noah was a fictional character, well known in Middle Eastern folk tales of the time, probably dating back to the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.