Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the things we currently craft last that long.
I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.
Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.
Satellites will be up in space, able to be found by "space archeologists" for literally tens of thousands of years. Sure we maybe won't be able to communicate with them anymore, but that's basically the same as how this gauntlet was dug up out of the ground - the knights who might've used it likely weren't able to "communicate" (find) the gauntlet because it was buried underground.
How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather than, something fit for purpose?
You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking, "What the hell did they make this thing for?"
In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.
NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.
But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.
I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.
I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.
The pinnacle of human achievement in our time is harnessing fossil fuels to replace biomass and whale oil as primary energy sources, enabling massive fertilizer synthesis (cheaper and more plentiful food), cheap concrete and steel production, and plastics. I'm pretty sure those plastics, and maybe even a PowerGlove, will still be around in landfills to be dug up in centuries to come.
I hate that I have to put the disclaimer here that there are obviously costs to the planet and us for this achievement, but it is undoubtedly what characterizes the age we live in (late-19th century forward) in a way that is arguably (if not self-evidently) heretofore unseen in all of human history.
