Basically. 99 Percent Invisible did a podcast on this very topic: Episode 468 Alphabetical Order

Mythbusters did this with coffee whitener as I recall. Impressive.

This has also happened to sawmills and flour mills, under less controlled circumstances.

Relevant XKCD :

https://xkcd.com/908/

I’m pretty sure that 80% if what we learned from the Nazi/Imperial Japan super unethical experiments was “what can a psychotic doctor justify in order to have an excuse to torture people to death.”

Maybe 20% was arguably useful, and most of that could have been researched ethically with other methods.

Made the Eros comparison just a few comments above!

They were dead anyways (thanks to Protogen releasing the protomolecule), the real tragedy would be to let their deaths be in vain…

Eros in the Expanse.

That’s what I’m assuming the original diagram is showing, the “Observable Universe” in some sort of radically increasing scale.

I heard the kids these days are all electrowetting.

I know there are several seminal works locked in archives or even just lost.

I couldn’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but I was considering the fate of Microprose, Sierra On-Line, and other studios that were gobbled up, disbanded, broken up, etc.

Your Mechwarrior example is a good example of licensing, where you might have defunct TTRPG studios (FASA) licensing a property to a have company it studio that has also gone though several mergers.

There should be a “use it or lose it” provision in copyright law, kind of like back in the day with what happened to “It’s A Wonderful Life”. The only reason IAWL became a Christmas classic isbecause it became public domain.

And this is the real cost. Sorry Mario Brothers will pretty much always be available as long as Nintendo is around, but obscure games or classics with disputed Copyright will disappear.

Who is out there even trying to stream the old Sierra games? At least they are on GoG, but I know even GoG has tried to track down current copyright holders for old classics and the are plenty of orphan games where after several mergers and divestments, there is some uncertainty, and it’s not worth it for any of the potential copyright holders to sort it out and license it, and unfortunately it’s not worth it for GoG to publish it to find out if they’ll sue GoG.

This is why Abandonware is such an important concept.