Recovery Manual for Civilization

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a biodiversity store in Anarctica

One thing generally neglected in these discussions are human institutions. Law, management, history, currency, commercial codes. Get human institutions wrong, and you're humped regardless of the amount of tech you have.

It seems like the north & south poles could be natural schelling points for storing information to transmit to far-future civs: they're cold, so things preserve well, and they're unique points on the earth's surface.

Knowledge is very fragile. When Hellenistic civilization fell to the Romans c 150 BC, it left behind libraries of science, but the Romans never understood it. Virtually all of the books have since been lost, so we don't know how much the Greeks understood, but we do know how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and that the Romans never understood, but instead substituted magic.

On the other hand, today is the proper day to sit in the dark around a weakly glowing screen and tell each other scary stories... X-)

I was thinking about this two days ago, which is an odd synchronicity.

My first conclusion was that there are all kinds of events that could lead to a collapse of civilization without exterminating humanity directly. But it may be impossible for humanity to rise back from the ashes if it stays there too long. Humanity can't take the same path it took to get to where it is now. For example, humanity developed different forms of energy as prices of previous forms rose. For example, we started digging up shallow coal when population grew too high to use charcoal produced from wood. But many of those resources are no longer near the surface. All coal, oil, and gas near the surface has been extracted. So humanity, if it rose again, would have to find a different path.

My conclusion was that I would not want to invest enough time into preparing for the end of the world to get personally involved in preparing for the end of civilization. But some people already do: all the survivalists and similar people. So, if I want to help civilization recover after a collapse, my best alternative is not to try to store the information myself. Instead, it is to reduce the information to a useful form and give it to these people. This is far more robust that trying to think of the best way of having the information survive. Give it to a few thousand people in scattered places with different survival strategies, and it is much more likely that the information survives.

These two facts together led me to conclude that a collaboration to prepare some kind of big, easily read manual of technology would be a valuable contribution to the survival of humanity. It would need to build on itself, somewhat like tech trees in strategy games.

Plus, it would be really amusing for the LW community to decide that one of its bets for saving humanity is to help outfit survivalists with technical know-how.

Obviously we need to buy up a bunch of slide rules and books about using them, and then stash them in secure but findable places.

Isaac Asimov, of all people, even published a book on slide rules back in the 1960's:

http://www.amazon.com/An-Easy-Introduction-Slide-Rule/dp/0395065755

I think a better question is why would people try to rebuild civilization. Industrial revolution was driven by economic factors which are certainly not applicable in this case, unless you mean waiting until population rises to 1800 - level again.

Nit picky, but I must say, big blocks of text are hard to read. I can follow much better if you divided it into paragraphed chunks.

The whole internet archive is a quite a lot of information.

As far as storing backups of other digital information copyright is a huge problem. It's much easier to simply store the data yourself then asking for permission to store it. That means various people are likely to have backups of a lot of the worlds knowledge without being open about the fact that they have them.

One could bury Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, or a bunch of other items suggested by The Long Now Foundation

Since no one's yet included the links to the Long Now Foundation's blog posts in which they discuss suggestions for such items and other projects that are attempts in this direction, here they are:

http://blog.longnow.org/02010/04/06/manual-for-civilization/

http://blog.longnow.org/category/manual-for-civilization/manual-book-lists/

http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3429/how-might-modern-humans-leave-a-message-for-50-000-years

What information would we store?

Why not all of it, or at least all the information we can easily find in a digital format? It still freaks me out every now and then, but we've passed the age where hard drives limited the amount of data you could possess. Of course you still would want some data to be more easily accessible and findable after a global catastrophe (so I feel like I'm not really answering the question 'Which data do you need after a global catastrophe'), but that's no reason to not store all of it.

TEOTWAWKI is a very popular discussion topic. Google gives a million hits just on this abbreviation.

While reinventing wheels can be a pleasant pastime, I'm not sure it's a very useful activity...

Kind of crackpotty. You have been warned.

I'm going to mention the Global Village Construction Set, which I think is interesting, and The Georgia Guidestones, which are a different kind of interesting.

I'm also going to mention The City of Ember, a children's/young adult novel, (also made into a passable 2008 film of the same name). The premise of The City of Ember is a subterranean city that maintains the glowing embers of humanity in the event of global catastrophe. None of the residents of Ember have any knowledge of their city's purpose, or of the wider world. The city is in a state of considerable disrepair, having been running beyond its intended operational lifespan, and this is what drives the story.

To my mind, it seems one of the biggest problems of preserving information for post-catastrophe societies is literacy. Guaranteeing a common written language with the survivors of a cataclysmic event (or their descendants, to whom literacy might not be an important skill) seems like a tricky proposition. If you leave a big pile of books for people to find, and no-one's capable of reading them, the whole enterprise is a wasted effort.

Here's where Ember comes in: humans speaking a living language can teach that language to other humans they encounter. Would it be possible to preserve literacy, (as well as other notions of civilisation like agriculture, governance and cat pictures) in an Ember-like environment? By this I mean a sheltered society with sufficient capital surplus to maintain a high level of literacy, not necessarily a ruinous subterranean city governed by Bill Murray.

More and more people are thinking about upcoming catastrophe, we living in harsh times isn't it? However just before WW II due to some social survey people considered their environment stable and nobody preached of upcoming disaster. I didn't enjoy reading The Knowledge despite the catchy title, book isn't very exciting and I find it quite irritating that author persists on the point that after the catastrophe all the resources except for human will be available for some time, so if you want to get some food then go to grocery store, or if you want to change your location get a car from auto dealer.

If we deeply deeply care about general risk that wipes out 90% of all humans and/or 90% of all technology and information storage, we need not only technological solutions but we need a culture that deeply deeply cares about prevention and, since this is the actual hypothetical, preparation. What that means is that any professional possessing any useful knowledge in building the technological foundations of civilizations makes at least basic preparations to store and transfer his knowledge, both about his tools and any theoretical foundations. That means learning the basics by heart so in case of their survival this knowledge is available. This means storing copies of all the basic books in safe places. Fewer copies of more advanced books. And maybe one with very specialised knowledge.

It means having a basic supply of unusually hardy but more effective tools that is not used in day-to-day business. Screwdrivers, hammers and axes are basic tools almost everyone should have at home, but anything that moves is more fragile and should be available to any community in a hardy version, as easy to use and maintain as possible. Even worse is anything that calculates electronically. These things tend to break completely, are impossible to repair and need to be replaced using absurdly advanced machinery. It is exactly there parts that need to be replaced with less potent equivalents, and it is exactly that absurdly advanced machinery that needs to be protected together with all knowledge and specialised people around them.

But what should such a culture look like? How could it be installed? I do not have the faintest idea. What we are looking for is an antifragile community or society, living the life today but prepared for a future much much worse than this one. What I do know is that no single human could prepare himself for such a dystopian future, only whole communities. All amenities we enjoy in civilization are only here because we cooperate and so we will only further enjoy them if we continue to cooperate after the event.

Knowledge is an extremely fragile thing. Small preliterate societies forgot basic things like how to make a canoe because their population shrunk. Will we forget even basic things like to avoid radioactive waste disposal sites? Quite possibly. But did we forget religion and cultural tropes over thousands of years? We did not. They changed, yes, but we did not forget, they're still here. So that's where I would look for preparation.