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OK, a few answers about Starflung.
1: What's a shared world?
A shared world is a setting which is agreed on between a number of writers, each of whom then write their own stories in that setting. Stories may touch off each other, characters from one may appear in another, and so on. Published examples include Thieves' World, Liavek, Bordertown, and so on. The Star Wars Expanded Universe could arguably be one such, although it tends toward complete novels, not short stories. There is usually one editor in control of the overall plot, and major events within the setting - the editor may or may not write their own stories as well.
2. Wasn't it neo-Mayan revolutionaries in 2012, not an unknown cause in 2060?
It was, but cool and all as the neo-Mayans are, they now have only eight years to get going, and the world looks a little different now than it did five years ago, when we laid down the original plans for Starflung. 2048 seems an actual possible date for scientific research stations on Mars.
3. Why did the starflung humans forget where Earth was?
I dunno. Do you remember where your great-x100-grandmother was from? A single piece of information like that, with very little practical use, is unlikely to make it down through thirty centuries. Perhaps if someone really dug in and did research across all the human civilisations across the galaxy, they could guess to within a couple of thousand light-years where Earth was.
1: What's a shared world?
A shared world is a setting which is agreed on between a number of writers, each of whom then write their own stories in that setting. Stories may touch off each other, characters from one may appear in another, and so on. Published examples include Thieves' World, Liavek, Bordertown, and so on. The Star Wars Expanded Universe could arguably be one such, although it tends toward complete novels, not short stories. There is usually one editor in control of the overall plot, and major events within the setting - the editor may or may not write their own stories as well.
2. Wasn't it neo-Mayan revolutionaries in 2012, not an unknown cause in 2060?
It was, but cool and all as the neo-Mayans are, they now have only eight years to get going, and the world looks a little different now than it did five years ago, when we laid down the original plans for Starflung. 2048 seems an actual possible date for scientific research stations on Mars.
3. Why did the starflung humans forget where Earth was?
I dunno. Do you remember where your great-x100-grandmother was from? A single piece of information like that, with very little practical use, is unlikely to make it down through thirty centuries. Perhaps if someone really dug in and did research across all the human civilisations across the galaxy, they could guess to within a couple of thousand light-years where Earth was.
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While we've certainly lost most of the knowledge that human civilizations had 30 centuries ago, for most of that time, there were no printing presses, or even widespread literacy. We've done pretty well with keeping around quite a lot of information with very little practical use since the advent of the printing press. Thirty centuries from now is only 7.5 times the length of time we've kept the works of Galileo, and one and a third times the length of time we've kept a portion of the works of Archimedes, (and I doubt that we've lost any of the latter since the invention of the printing press.) These are of no practical use; modern astronomy and math textbooks make them obsolete. Only nostalgia makes us keep them around.
Secondly, these are spacefaring civilizations. I would presume that the knowledge of where things are in space would be more important to them than it is to us. The knowledge of where in space they (as a species) came from would seem particularly interesting. Certainly the number of historians, archaeologists and paleontologists in our own civilization who dedicate themselves to recovering and keeping alive knowledge about where we came from suggests that this is something humans generally find interesting. And the synopsis you gave of Starflung suggests that people in 5000 CE find it interesting too. It's just the people between 2060 and 5000 who lost interest.
I don't think this kills the premise; I just think there needs to be a good reason, if getting into my suspension of disbelief radius is something you care about.
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Consider the Rosetta Stone, or the breaking of the Maya Code. The manner in which information is recorded can change completely over time. In thirty centuries, 21st-century Earth languages will bear a similar relation to the languages spoken by the various starflung peoples as that borne by proto-Indo-European to modern English. The starflung worlds will have developed their own language families, alphabets, systems of measurement. (For comparison: the modern equivalents of the weights and measures used in Ireland in the nineteenth century are debated by scholars today - what are the chances of, say, the term "kilometre" retaining its meaning over such a swathe of time?)
The location of Old Earth will have become an article of faith (and thus not available for scientific evaluation) on some worlds, an irrelevancy on others. Most people will have much more immediately important things to worry about. There will be abstruse philosophical debates over the very nature of Old Earth. Some will claim that it is simply a metaphor for heaven - or hell - or the collective unconscious - or the great pink spirit-sea from which we all are born. Worlds may even go to war over it.
Scientific "knowledge" is surprisingly fragile in the face of competing world views. Also, given accidents of history I reckon it's more or less arbitrary what gets preserved and what doesn't (cf. the burning of the library at Alexandria).
Will that do you? :-)
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One thing to keep in mind is all the vary catastrophies that can affect information transfer and preservation. Computers can crash. Libraries (even small portable ones) can be destroyed. Wars can break out. Ships can be lost. Someone can deliberately suppress information...it's quite possible to imagine someone erasing all reference to Earth's location in a database for the express purpose of preventing anyone from attempting to go back there, for any number of motivations from simple "We burned the boats behind us" motivational ones to religious ones. "We are on the grand crusade, and there will be no returning." While I agree that it's much harder for us to lose the information than it was, it's still lamentably possible.
As for the 'How much do Americans know about Europe" it brings up a new idea: I know, generally, where Europe is. However, I could not get there without relying on someone else, who actually knows how to get there and can run the machines that will take me. So generally, my knowledge of Europe's location is not useful. If a caste of transport engineers arose in a culture, only they would know how to get to Earth...and cultural specialization of that kind can render information inaccessible as well. "Well, only the Sky-Priests know how to reach the sacred tabernacle."
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That said, I do think your faith in humans' capacity to preserve knowledge may be rather overstating the case. You can have the formula for working out the length of a meter, but if you don't have ready access to the crystal in question (e.g. if it's not common in your part of the universe), or if there is serious scholarly debate over what precise crystal is meant - the languages have evolved for three millennia, remember - you've still got a problem.
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Individual Libraries of Alexandria do get destroyed, but there are a lot more libraries on the scale of the LoA now than there were in 400 CE. A very conservative guess is that there is one per 100,000 people in the developed world. Now multiply that by the hundreds of worlds in the first wave of colonization. That's how many libraries of Alexandria you have to destroy, and you'd better do it before the knowledge escapes to the second wave of colonization, or the problem gets a lot worse. I am assuming the continuous availability of printing press technology in a substantial proportion of colonies.
As for alphabets, as a rule, literate societies stick with the alphabet they have. Exceptions, (like Turkish switching from Arabic to Latin, or Azeri switching from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic to Latin,) do happen, but they are almost always to other popular established alphabets. (Hangul is a weird exception to everything.) This means that it's pretty likely that at least one modern alphabet will survive intact.
Languages: Another example would be Ancient Greek vs. Modern Greek. The divergence there hasn't been too huge. There are scholars who can read and understand the words of Plato and Aristotle in the original. There ought to be scholars 2500 years from now who can understand Modern English. The wealth of information and literature published in English would certainly give them motivation.
Even language doesn't really need to be preserved well for the location of the Sun to be remembered. A copy of a cheap star chart that an amateur astronomer would buy should be sufficient to trace back the position of the Sun. (The first colony ships should have data a lot better than that, but let's say it degrades to that level.) Even if most stars haven't been visited, just about everything on that star chart should be in star catalogs¹, so all it would take is some serious number crunching, (not exploration.)
¹ There are ~100 billion stars in the Galaxy. With current technology we have made star catalogs with ~500 million stars. So I figure all it would take to get a catalog with all of the, (not terribly faint at least,) stars in the galaxy is to take surveys from perhaps 1000 different places with technology about 10 times as good as what we have now.
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Right now, to destroy all those Libraries of Alexandria you mentioned, all I'd need is one good scale nuclear war. Even if the data wasn't wiped from the machines, in the absence of power plants and other infrastructures, databases become bricks. That doesn't even take into account that those that survive such an outbreak of hostilities are going to be focused on the here and now instead of, say, the location of the first archaeological dig site where indo-european languages have been found engraved on coins. Now, if colonization takes place in balkanized waves rather than as great migrations (as it generally has over the course of human history) and there isn't some kind of galaxy wide communications network that can triumph over lightspeed boundaries (and for all I know there is, I'm just musing) it becomes ludicrously easy to lose all sorts of important information. It took a thousand years for something as useful as concrete to reoccur in the west, after all, and it was up to men like Gerbert of Aurilliac to return the proper astronomical information so that ship navigation via the stars became feasible again.
I do take your point about alphabets retaining. I think my suggestion for pushing it 30,000 years into the future would deal with that, but it is a valid point and one that requires scrutiny. One possible way around it is to argue for movements similar to that in A Clockwork Orange and 1984, where certain colonies engage in Maoistic cultural revolutions, perhaps going so far as to initiate whole new languages that deliberately eschew certain prospects. A culture might not even have a word for 'Earth' anymore.
Obviously, it makes more sense to present that at least some societies do in fact retain the location of Earth over all this time. Some might simply never see a reason to use it, while others might well be unable to use it (and I sincerely suggest that there should not be a means to send faster than light communications aside from the old standby of loading a message on a pod and launching it at FTL speeds at your destination...bringing a kind of interstellar pony express back to the setting, and allowing for cultural stagnation and balkanization: if you have a galactic internet, a lot of these problems of 'how did they lose the location of Earth' become magnified') and so it takes time for the future's version of Heinrich Schliemann to put together all the varied traditions and reassemble a star map pointing the way to Earth. I mean, eventually they do find it again, after all.
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And books remain books.
I guess I was assuming fairly easy FTL and a lot of communication between colonies, but it doesn't have to be that way. The problem with FTL being harder is that it means you don't get very far. And if you haven't gotten very far, the space that the sun can be in is correspondingly small.
Here's a thought. "Good" colony planets are likely to be few and far between, (compared to bad ones.) So the richest colony ventures will buy the best FTL drives in order to be able to reach them and will have the resources to get the colony on its feet and up to a reasonable tech level relatively quickly, but they'll be far away from Earth or other colonies. "Bad" colony planets will be more common closer in (well, more common everywhere, but it's the closer in ones that get colonised first.) So they're going to be at a lower tech level, but they have cultural diversity on their side, (which is good and bad, more trade and innovation, but more war, more culture churn than isolated colonies, so languages can change more.) Isolated colonies will probably have less linguistic change, but they might be more susceptible to weird isolationist ideologies, ("the throne of the Emperor is the center of the Universe, so all this talk about Earth is heresy.) And so their level of technology, initially high, could get surpassed by the "bad" colonies right as they are coming back into contact. Sort of a China / Europe dynamic, except possibly with multiple Chinas.
I kind of like this because it puts one piece of the puzzle, (a language and culture not far removed from 21st century) in one place, and the other piece, (ancient documents in this language that are more likely to have survived in one of the "bad" colonies,) in another place.
I don't know if I like "Where is the Sun" being that puzzle, but it might be a nice starting place for something.
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True, but you don't have to look very hard in our own culture to notice how few people read books anymore. For instance, I checked a copy of Josephus' The Jewish War out of my local library this month...and the last person to check it out before me did so in 1982. And Seattle has a lot of colleges. Now, in the case of total nuclear war, what are the odds that anyone's going to care about Josephus' enough to preserve his work? Multiply that by all the other books that are chock full of historically relevant knowledge yet are esoteric or difficult to find and which don't directly preserve one's life in the case of a dark age scenario...you can easily lose a lot of information that way.
Still, it's very true that such information could well exist, and eventually be picked up again, much as Pythias the Greek's reports of his travels beyond the Mediterranean eventually were rediscovered and re-evaluated. Which fits in extremely well with your 'good/bad' colony dynamic, as an eventual expansion of various colonies brings those who preserved the older books and datafiles into contact with those who have the expertise to make use of them. It may not necessarily be "where is the sun" so much as "which one of these candidates is the sun", which could make more sense. (After all, the first place we go after Earth might well have plenty of time to build up a mystique of its own and be mistaken for the birthplace of man, especially if those that remain there have their own reasons for obfuscating the issue...your 'throne of the Emperor' example comes to mind.)
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Still, I don't think Josephus is in much trouble in the event of nuclear war, (assuming humanity survives as a species, and that part of western civilization can get up to 1500 CE tech level within 500 years.) There have to be a lot of copies out there. (Of course, the Starflung scenario is worse than generic nuclear war in some ways, though better in others.)
As for "which one of these candidates is the sun", I think making it not obvious once you have physical access to the candidates requires (among other things,) destroying not only all multi-cellular life, but also most post-cambrian sedimentary rock, and any disaster that does that doesn't leave much interesting for the folks coming back to Earth to look at.
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However, the information does not have to have been lost by all the outgoing colonies. The diaspora is 360°, and in 3 dimensions, as much as the "flat" structure of the galaxy allows. Say there are 36 colony ships headed out at 10° intervals - this isn't in any way likely, but it'll do for example. Say that 6 of those meet some disaster or failure, and drift onwards as hulks. Say that 3 of those are people who want to burn their boats; erasing the records of where Earth is. Say that 3 of them lose the information through neglect (when did you last check old floppies?). And say 3 meet with hostile aliens, who capture the humans and destroy their primitive ships. We have 21 ships left now. If another few of them lose the information by other means (overwrite it with the latest greatest play by Willard Cybershake, fire in the Archive Chamber, deliberately erased by the New Vandals, suppressed by a new religion, cryptography key lost...) and those ships are the more successful colonies, then you can quickly arrive at a state where all but a few isolated colonies have lost the data. The information does not have to be wholly lost to be considered lost by the majority of the galaxy.
Indeed, it may be that somewhere a bit later in the story, some other human civilisation will breeze by, saying "What, you lost it? Idiots. We drop by every century for a quick poke around, and say Mass on the moon."
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Now, in the time between Homer (BC 800 or so) and the birth of Christ, the peoples of Greece and Asia Minor preserved traditions of where Troy was (Troy being the place Homer wrote about in his Epic) - and despite the fact that both Greeks and various Asiatic empires from Lydia to the Medes and Persians considered the site sacred and often visited it before invading the other (As Xerxes did before the Persian War, and Alexander in turn did before his destruction of the Persian Empire) the site was lost to scholarship by the turn of the millennium, despite various local traditions...and indeed, perhaps because of various local tradition which contradicted each other. Now,. Schliemann wasn't the first to suspect the mound at Hissarlik, nor was he even the first to dig there (after all, he leased the site from a pair of English brothers who served as English and even American consuls in the area) but he was the first to make enough noise so that the nascent Archaeological community had to take him seriously and check on his results. So while Troy was 'lost', some never forgot where it was.
Similarly, it's quite possible that some cultures would argue that no, it's this planet orbiting Alpha Centauri (or Beta Centauri, or Bernard's Star, or whatever) that is the *true* homeland of humanity.
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How expensive is it to build an FTL ship?
How expensive is it to travel a given distance?
How far can a ship can go without needing refueling and repairs?
How much can a ship carry? (in terms of people, cargo, data.)
How wealthy are colonies, (i.e., how many ships can they afford?)
And what is the range of cultural priorities in terms of how starships are used, (colonization, luxury tourism, trade, exploration, warfare.)
And aliens are a whole 'nother bundle of worms. What are they like? How do you resolve the Fermi paradox?
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'Kay?
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Yes, he had all that theoretical knowledge - 'There's navigation, and electricity, and engineering, and medicine, and...' But despite him knowing about them - he couldn't actually apply any of them. I reckon I'd be the same - as would most people.