Alexandria

It’s 2:03 a.m. My window is cracked open, and the longer I stay up, the more I lose precious sleep time. Still, my thoughts keep me awake. You know those nights when a random thought engulfs your mind and you can’t get it out of your head until you’ve pondered it? Tonight, for me, it’s the Library of Alexandria.

If you know me, you know how much I love "what ifs" in human history, and this one is no different.

I don’t remember exactly how I got here. Maybe it was a quote on social media, or more likely a TikTok that showed up on my For You page while I was doomscrolling. But once the thought landed, it stuck in my mind: What if the Library of Alexandria had never burned down?

If you’ve never heard about it, or only vaguely remember it from a history class, here’s a short version: The Library of Alexandria was founded in Egypt during the third century B.C. It wasn’t just a place to store books; it was a temple to human history. Imagine a world where scholars from Greece, Egypt, India and beyond came together to study, debate and share what they knew. There were astronomers, mathematicians, poets, scientists and translators. It was a diverse and perfect culmination of human knowledge—something modern-day historians could only dream of experiencing.

It’s estimated the library may have held 400,000 to 700,000 scrolls—not books, but scrolls—written by hand. Ideas that someone sat with, shaped and sealed in ink. Knowledge passed down across time and cultures, brought into one space to be preserved, understood and added to.

Then it all went up in smoke.

There’s debate about how it was destroyed. Julius Caesar might have accidentally set it ablaze during a military campaign. Others say it was gradually dismantled over time through neglect, political shifts and religious uprisings. No single villain, no dramatic cinematic moment—just centuries of apathy and missed chances. In a way, that makes it worse.

Because it wasn’t just a building that burned. It was a buildup of many small problems that caused it to be lost to time.

What were we on the verge of discovering? Could we have advanced medicine by hundreds of years? Could we have avoided wars with a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures and philosophies? Would North America have been discovered earlier? Who would have colonized what is now the United States first? Could we have developed technologies that still feel like science fiction today?

It keeps me up (on nights like this) to think we might have known the Earth revolved around the sun centuries earlier, or had a working theory of atoms, the nervous system—even flying machines. These weren’t science fiction fantasies. There’s evidence some of this knowledge existed, or was close to existing, in those scrolls.

And yet, here we are—picking up the pieces generations later. Starting from scratch on ideas that may have once already lived, breathed and died in those scrolls. Gone, because we didn’t protect them.

What I can’t shake is that we’re still losing knowledge—not to flames, but to neglect. We’re surrounded by information, yet somehow more disconnected from understanding. There’s access, but not always intention.

Truth competes with noise.

We underfund the places meant to preserve learning and dismiss the voices that push us to think deeper. It’s not as dramatic as a fire, but the effect feels the same—we let valuable knowledge slip away. Quietly. Constantly.

And yeah, I know—I’m just one person staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. I’m not trying to solve the world’s knowledge crisis with a single thought. But it makes me wonder: What if we treated learning as sacred? What if we approached every conversation, every story, every piece of information with the kind of reverence the ancient scholars once did?

The Library of Alexandria might be gone. But the idea of it—the dream behind it—doesn’t have to be.

Maybe it’s in every open book, every thoughtful question, every time someone chooses curiosity over certainty. Maybe it lives again every time we choose to preserve knowledge, share it and protect it—not just for ourselves, but for the next generation.

At 2 a.m., when the world feels heavy and the past feels painfully close, I think about what we lost in the fire. But I also think about what we still have the power to protect.

Because knowledge, once lost, is hard to recover.

But knowledge shared? That’s how you rebuild a library.