Happy Birthday, Internet

It's hard to believe the internet is only twenty-five years old. Somehow, it seems like it's been around forever. Even before I ever laid hands on a computer, I'd heard about the web. Of course, in those days, it was knowledge in the abstract. Our community didn't get access to the internet unitl the late nineties.
This all hit home yesterday. I had been wanting to get a new avatar (yet another concept that is relatively new) for my facebook site. You just plug in the generalities of what you want, and up come hundreds of thousands of links. I don't think there is a single topic that hasn't been posted somewhere in cyber space. It's like the collective knowledge of the planet is at your fingertips.
The drawback to this is that a lot of younger kids don't feel the need to learn facts anymore. When they are asked to write an essay on a topic, they will go to the internet, get the information and then paste it together into a paper. They don't bother to read the important stuff and draw conclusions from it anymore, to actually get something out of the assignment. What happens on that fateful day when they find themselves in a place without internet access? (Though the odds of that are getting smaller and smaller each day.)
It is comforting to know that everything, good and bad, that mankind has ever created is out there somewhere though. As long as one server and a couple thousand hard drives are out there, the sum of human knowledge is almost impossible to lose. There might be gaps, but it will be mostly intact. One day, somebody will need that one obscure piece of our time to solve a critical problem, and it will be there with a little digging. It's like how the monks saved so much from being lost in the dark ages by keeping all of those books.
The funny thing is that those books, which formed the basis of the rebirth of civilization, can now be found on the internet!
Remember, when you upload anything, it's going into humanity's collective heritage.