"Science & technology are cool, but honestly they are nothing special. They're not unique. Think about it. Physics is a thing that's objectively true. You don't create it; all you do is notice it - so any intelligent species, given enough time to look around at the universe, is going to eventually figure out things like optics and chemistry, Newton's laws and Einstein's theory and all that stuff. They will eventually build computers and cars and rockets.

Not every "advanced" species will produce a Michelangelo. Not every civilization will build pyramids or a Great Wall. Not every culture will write Hamlet or Gilgamesh or The Tale of Genji. There are thousands of nuclear warheads, but there is only ONE golden mask of King Tutankhamen. There is only ONE Mona Lisa. Painting the Sistine Chapel or composing a Fifth Symphony is a wholly different thing than, say, discovering how hydrogen sticks to oxygen to make water, or building a Ford Model T.

I'm not saying that making cars and knowing how water is constituted isn't important. It's just that one thing is meaningful while the other is merely useful.

Art is unique. Art is more than an expression of what we know about the universe , or what we're technically capable of doing. Art is an expression of who we ARE. It is primal; it is important; it is the First Thing about being human, and apparently the only Thing worth protecting. Before there were computers or cars or rockets, there were paintings of mammoths on cave walls. There were legendary epics inscribed on clay tablets. There were portraits of statesmen and idols of gods. Stories seem to have been more important - or at least more durable - than facts. What does this say about ancient people? What does it say about us? What are our dead, crumbling computers and cars and rockets going to mean to the people who find them, thousands of years later?"