Maybe, maybe not. The civilization we enjoy today could be gone in a few hundred years, the Internet and it's semblance of informational permanence notwithstanding. I'm sure ancient Romans thought the Empire would last forever too.
> I'm sure ancient Romans thought the Empire would last forever too.
The Empire itself doesn't exist anymore sure, but I don't think the GP was talking about political structures.
Ancient Romans' culture never disappeared, we can still easily understand their language (some people can speak it, I learned it in school, and there's even a latin Wikipedia! and we still use it for creating new words in our modern languages) and their culture. Their culture has evolved into our modern European culture (mixed with others, to some degree), our modern democratic republican political systems are a mix of two systems both older than the Roman Empire, and there are no mysteries about aspects of their culture or infrastructure.
If the Romans had written a warning on a building in plain Latin about how entering it would unleash the wrath of the gods, we would have absolutely no problem to understand it.
We would still enter it, though, but not out of ignorance, we would enter it because we know we can today handle anything the Romans might have feared.
All in all, I think Romans are a pretty good example of how a powerful culture can stay understandable for several millenia.
> If the Romans had written a warning on a building in plain Latin about how entering it would unleash the wrath of the gods, we would have absolutely no problem to understand it.
Today we can, the privileged few in our current golden age of technology and widespread literacy. Take the non-privileged masses in the US and elsewhere, they wouldn't know what to do with Latin script written on a building, even now. They wouldn't know how to translate it on the web, they wouldn't even know it was a warning.
