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Ask Slashdot: Permanent Preservation of Human Knowledge?
Wayne2 writes "While there have been many attempts to preserve human knowledge in electronic format, it occurred to me that these attempts all assume that human civilization remains more or less intact. Given humanity's history of growth and collapse with knowledge repeatedly gained then lost, has anyone considered a more permanent solution? I realize that this could be very difficult and/or expensive depending on how long we want to preserve the information and what assumptions we make regarding posterity's ability to access it. Alternatively, are we, as a species, willing to start over if we experience a catastrophe, pandemic, etc. of significant magnitude on a global scale that derails our progress and sends us back to the dark ages or worse?"
It "protects" content right?
You can't copy humanity, "Stupidity" has been patented already.
Table-ized A.I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy
Engineer information into the genome of the most resilient of creatures on the planet, so even if we all die out and our DVDs corrode and disappear, something of us survives.
Low storage capacity but you can't beat their lifespan.
Say a cataclysm wipes out major cities, centers of learning, large chunks of the population, etc. but that you managed to preserve the exact DNA and RNA sequences of a lab rat. Without the machinery to use the data, and indeed without the entire medical industry to provide materiel for research using that knowledge, what does it really buy you? Or you preserve the technical schematics of the Tokamak reactor. When you're burning firewood for heat because the entire fossil fuel delivery aparatus is destroyed, who cares?
There's a degree of materials and available resources which would be available after a 'cataclysm' - the knowledge you'd need after that probably boils back down to the early industrial revolution.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Rosetta, stone tablets, parchment scrolls and other works which have survived destruction only by obscurity, sleight and secrecy which instructs that the methods are not as important as the means to which you secure knowledge for posterity.
...for Leibowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Bury it at the center of the moon. No one can destroy it then (or they could, if they have money to land on the moon). If civilization collapses again, all we have to do is reinvent space travel to get the knowledge of American Idol for our post-apocalyptic descendants. We can be assured as it goes down they will scrap the space and science programs first, so it will remain untouched.
Old style paper encyclopedias probably with low acid paper that documents most important stuff, lots of copies spread around, low tech, and can be accessed with limited technology.
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it... does it make a sound?
Whats the use of preserving humanity if there are no humans around to "be human"
... store knowledge within.
One wonders what would could be saved if things like pyramids and tombs are used to save a cubic ass tonne of knowledge.
Even if you could record something that survives more or less until the Earth is rendered lifeless due to solar expansion, you cannot guarantee any future intelligence would be able to understand it. The world's oldest civilizations had it right 40,000 years ago: images only, underground, worked in stone not exposed to weathering processes.
Check out the Rosetta Project - http://rosettaproject.org/about/
Self-sustaining civilizations on Mars, Europa, and extra-solar planets.
Well, velum has proved itself to last around a thousand years and papyrus a few thousand, both have survived the rise and fall of various empires - both also have the benefit of being easily readable. So paper looks like the most proven and accessible solution in modern times...
If you're planning for the fall and rise of civilisation, you need to prepare for the possibility of deliberate destruction - it's possible that a future civilisation might be so sickened by the actions of the past they seek to destroy all their works, or a religion might emerge which considers your documents heretical and in need of destruction, or perhaps a king feels that his people are living in the shadow of legendary greatness and only by destroying the legend will their story be honored.
So you're going to need to mass-produce whatever storage media you choose - make them by the millions and put them all over the world. In museums, in caves, burried or sunk offshore (Add a big chunk of iron, ready for when the metal detector is reinvented), as many as you can. So many it'd be impossible to destroy them all.
As for the actual storage medium? Tiny etchings on iridium would work. It's corrosion-resistant, and very, very hard wearing. It's last for millenia with ease, even in burried in moist soil or scoured by desert sand, and with such a high melting point it'd be untouched even if the containing building burned down. The only issue is the price: That stuff is expensive. Really expensive. It's cheaper than gold, but not by much.
Stone tablets. Period. Look at how long all the ones we've studied so far have lasted.
How do you tell people 10,000 years from now about a theory of operations, maintenance and repair? They have some innovative ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/
I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale. Sure, there was a regression in Europe after the Greeks and Romans. There were quite a few works lost. And it seems that there was a very early civilization around India that was abandoned (apparently due to crop failures). But the main protection for lost knowledge seems to be to spread knowledge around the world. The world has never simultaneously regressed (the Middle East and China weren't doing so bad during the European dark ages). The works of the Greeks wouldn't have been lost if their writings had larger distribution (instead of being confined to a relatively small area, which makes the fate of those earlier works dependent on the local conditions). As long as people keep writing and reading books, I don't see how much knowledge is going to be lost. There wasn't even much knowledge lost in Europe during the Black Plague - and that killed off 1/3rd of the people in Europe.
Perhaps the concern over "lost knowledge" says a lot about people's perception that some massive apocalyse is going to happen. I think, in general, people tend to grab onto ideas about "apocalypse" (which necessarily results in some massive social rearrangement) because they're not happy with the state of the world. Apocalyptic thinking is a little bit of a fantasy about starting over.
Books. It worked before, it should work again.
The electronic preservation angle was my wife's thesis.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
May I commend to you incised letters on stone? This has a long history of working, at least for human notions of permanent. You can go to places like Egypt , and bring back inscriptions from 3000+ years ago which you can read without trouble (well, at least if you know the language, which is another problem).
As far true permanence, and surviving things like the decay of protons in 10^35 years, you are on your own.
This comment wins at slashdot.
There are a few projects along these lines:
http://rosettaproject.org
Since people also have this tendency to go on an old fashioned knowledge destruction spree, anything short of a sattelite that can drop some emergency decoders/receivers down (in intervals) until a "rock is civilised" signal can be sent back seems error prone.
they are on it....
it's book. not ebooks because none of those will work anymore along with people that buying streaming rights to stuff
Seriously? "Permanent" is kind of a binary thing.
“The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.”
-- Louis L'Amour
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica
Back in the ancient times civilizations had small centers of learning and education, where a good disaster could clear out civilization and they more or less need to start over. However now information is spread across the world. A super volcano kills the US. Europe and Asia still has most of our information and society will continue on, and vice versa.
A major super major disaster would probably send us back 70 years. And would probably take us 30 years to recover.
We as people know about the internal combustion engine, transistors, optics... And could rebuild with our experience. Back in ancient times average joe knew how to make fire, the wheel and farming techniques. So a civilization was killed off, they didn't go have to reinvent the wheel, they already know how to make it. However in ancient times a small number of people understood mathematics, science, and reading, so it could get killed off and needed to be rediscovered. Not so much anymore today.
We are currently looking at our petty issues of today such as Bad economy and not having enough money for Food, Housing, BlueRay Player and an iPad, and having to pay for Cable too. So we are a bit depressed, people are protesting the government about stuff that governments tend to always do. And global warming creates more weather disasters that hit small areas. What is the East Coast compared to the rest of the world.
So if you want to be prepared for a collapse in civilization, think what they had in the 1940's
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Barring the development of a strong-AI level pedagogical expert system that can be stashed away somewhere, the task of actually preserving the present state of human knowledge in the absence of the background is pretty difficult.
Mere storage is actually the easy part: Even clay tablets have a modest survival rate when you burn the civilization that inscribed them down on top of them, and with modern materials and machine tools, we could mass produce something better(or really, really, really mass produce something cheaper, and distribute it all over the world).
The trouble comes once you start dealing with knowledge that exists largely in the form of continually-refreshed human capital, and with tools that exist largely in the form of a long chain of worse tools building better tools building better tools, etc. The amount of pure written knowledge you would need to restart/rebuild all the supporting industry to refill, say, a totally undistinguished hardware store, would be considerable, quite probably more than actually is written down(rather than learned on the job by the new guy from the old guy, and fabricated on tools that were built with parts fabricated with tools that go back to the early 20th century if not earlier).
You also run into encoding problems. "Graecum est; non legitur", and that was the allegedly educated class in a civilization that probably had some greek speakers available(and it'd hardly been a global thermonuclear holocaust that ended classical civilization). You'd need to choose some human languages, and god help you with the digital file formats...
In one of the episodes of the animated series The Batman, future archaeologists unearth the Batcave and find information etched in binary on the titanium support pillars.
Alternately, I wonder what projects the Long Now Foundation has in the works to do something like this. The Wikipedia page lists the Rosetta project but there may be something else for general knowledge.
DNA has a link to the past for many millions of years, is very robust and there is many many copies on site and off site.
The most secure way to preserve information is inside ourselves.
So, find a way to create "trash DNA" that don't generate proteins or any other changes, do it with huge redundancy (the same information in parts repeated sometimes, so mutations could be tolerated in a great degree), and we carry this information by generations, without risk of destroy the recipient of information, because it'd be on us.
It is quite simply impossible to preserve something for ever. What ever format you use to store the information assumes that the people in the future will be able to read it. Lets for example imagine that in the event of a catastrophic event that some civilisation other than America are the ones that service. Perhaps for example it is an obscure eskimo tribe that survives and it takes them two centuries to re-colonise the world to the point where they will discover your data left in America. How will they understand the English that has been written and even if they can translate it, what meaning will it have to them, the world might be a very different place by then. language changes so fast just try reading some Olde English from the 17th Century and see how you get on. We largely have translations of old languages like Ancient Greek and Hebrew used in the Bible as there has been an evolution of the language and so it has been possible to study the way the language has changed and work backwards, but translation is not an exact science hence why there are still disagreements over the exact translation of the bible to this day, hence the essence of you message may be lost. The best we can hope for is for institutions such as archives and libraries will continue to preserve information for the future and that enough of our civilisation survives to pass the information into the future. Hoping of corse that some religious nutters don't don't destroy it all like the Christians did with the library in Alexandria because the material didn't fit with their ideals.
Periodically send up long distance spacecraft loaded with not just data but the means to view it and the means to rebuild from first principles, assuming a child was viewing it - here is how you find iron deposits, mine and refine them, this is how you forge ploughs, these are the basics of algebra. Have them programmed to circle around somewhere just inside Jupiter's orbit, and have multiple stations here on earth sending out a deadman signal - when they stop broadcasting, the vessels begin to return in waves seperated by ten years or so, with the last waves arriving once a century.
When they make it home, have them attempt to locate likely inhabited areas whether by thermal imaging looking for fires at night or just vegetation profiling for fields, then drop down nearby, broadcasting light and sound, even radio, until someone comes to investigate.
It's relatively easy to permanently preserve all of mankind's knowledge, just pack it in a rocket and send it Oort-cloud bound. Well permanently as in astronomical timescales. The trick is to preserve all of humanity's knowledge in a way that's useful to humanity in the future.
"The message will be accompanied by a short video message by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and images required for the re-creation of fundraiser banners."
I can tell it's definitely the real deal and in no way an April Fool's joke!
Create a Foundation to preserve all knowledge
Ahh no sweat there the NSA surely thought about a solution to store all the data forever ;)
Listen, man. The suns will always be out. There is no "night". Your theories about former civilizations with knowledge are insane.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Alternatively, are we, as a species, willing to start over if we experience a catastrophe, pandemic, etc. of significant magnitude on a global scale that derails our progress and sends us back to the dark ages or worse?
Willing? Like we have control over the cosmos and would choose to hit ourselves with an asteroid, or get decimated by a plague? First thing is to set expectations on "permanent", because in reality...there is no such thing. The Earth, the Sun, even the universe has an expiration date. In order to even begin to narrow the types of materials needed you would need to define the duration of "permanent" before you went anywhere. I couldn't dig it up but I seem to remember an article online about something like this. Using thin diamond sheets to encode information into or the like that would be able to survive hundreds if not thousands of years intact if locked away like the seed vault. If I find it I will reply to this if someone else hasn't posted it elsewhere in the thread.
It's very simple. Anything you want to preserve forever, publish it in National Geographic. It will be printed 30 million times, distributed across the world, and stored permanently in people's basements. Losing it permanently requires losing all of those basements.
Bitcoin is the perfect solution for decentralized knowledge preservation.
This topic reminds me of the Georgia Guidestones.
They are a monument of granite stones that contain ten simple "guidelines" for future civilisations.
The guidelines are repeated in eight different languages: each language having a face of each of the four main stones.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
This is the same as asking what information & how to preserve it for a generational starship. While en route there would be limited need for much of the accumulated knowledge, but once established as a distant colony, that would change.
Corollary would be: what is the minimum population required to maintain the diverse productive capacity that feeds our standard of living (both #'s of diverse producers and consumers to achieve satisfactory economies of scale) ( acknowledging that on demand production is coming) and product development improvements.
Don't worry about it, shove everything to the cloud, the govement keeps a copy forever.
Microfiche lasts about 5x as long as paper and is 98x more efficient space wise. It can be read with a magnifying glass and a light source.
That's going to be hard to beat.
I regularly carve pictures and patterns into various rocks around my property. I often wonder what future scientists will think of them. And now I wonder if someone will try to construct something meaningful in the crap I leave around my ranch...
Durable, easy to read.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
As the span of time reaches infinity the probability of a global catastrophic event approaches 1. It *will* happen eventually.
This assumes a fixed probability over all time.
If the probability lowers over time, then the cumulative probability can be bounded to any chosen value.
Consider: is the probability of world-wide plague higher or lower than it was 300 years ago? The probability of large-scale crop failures? Nuclear war?
You could say that the probabilities are higher in each case, yet the historical statistical evidence shows that the number and severity of wars has decreased, plague vectors have been detected and averted (SARS, Bird flu), and crop productivity has skyrocketed beyond all projected yields.
Statistically speaking, we're much more secure in our civilization simply because we are more aware of our surroundings, are smarter, and have more technology to apply to problems.
We're even beginning to discuss and proposing solutions to asteroid impacts.
The probability of a global catastrophic event is decreasing. If it hasn't happened yet, it'll become ever less likely in the future.
- "Alternatively, are we, as a species, willing to start over if we experience a catastrophe, pandemic, etc. of significant magnitude on a global scale that derails our progress and sends us back to the dark ages or worse?"
After we're done with our resources, with what dou you want to rebuild ?
We're already facing major shortages of non-renewable metals and ores in the next 50 years.
After we're done with this planet, there won't be enough left to rebuild a civilization.
real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it
If they had only followed St L's directions, they would have recreated a civilized society.
But who's Emma, and where is her home?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You'd be surprised.
At a meeting a couple of years back, I was talking to someone that I think was the head of the British Library (I remember 'head of' and 'British' even though he was an American) We talked about some of my work in trying to come up with definitions that different communities can agree on, and he said that he had been at a meeting of archivists and they were having trouble defining 'permenant preservation'.
He said they came up with a definition that was effectively 'make sure we can understand it tomorrow, then do the same thing tomorrow'
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Tint printed letters old plates (Holy Joseph Smith!) or some ceramic. This presumes the technology of hand lenses will be remembered or reinvented. I've seen a number of essays on this topic, especially since the invention of computers. this was commonly suggested. we've learned to decode the lost scripts of forgotten languages, e.g. Egyption, cuneifomr, assuming we have enough text.
Preserve stuff for a long time? If long enough, either there'll be nobody left to read, or they can't read at all, or they now speak some other language and it's all academic anyway. Possibly. So not that interesting.
As to whether we want to start over after a catastrophe, well, either we do, or we get to live like, nay, we'll be like cavemen again. That or we simply die off. Take your pick.
There's been various projects, like long information storage, or the basic few machines to start a farm, or whatnot. You can also look at what the Amish do, or other subsistence farmers. Another interesting thing is what's called the "appropriate technology" idea and movement. An euphemism to patronise the developing world again, so it's ultimately not going to work, no matter how good the technological ideas or the intentions. Meanwhile, the ideas are interesting in and of themselves.
There's also the "living history" and bushcraft people. They have some interesting tricks to share.
My angle was that of the following question: You're left with any knowledge you've cared to've gathered beforehand. No limit on how much you can take (as a first approximation). But you can't have anything else.
Nothing. No clothes, no guns, not even knives. Anything beyond the knowledge you must make, and that includes making the tools to make the tools to make the tools. Now build up the tech base again, to at least, arbitrarily, 19th century.
What knowledge do you need for that? Go and work it out and maybe make a dependency chart. You're allowed to take shortcuts from what history did, but it has to be doable from scratch.
How you'd preserve that knowledge is another project entirely. But you need a base line to inform just what you need to store and how to store it--if your intended audience can't read it, it's useless. So I'd take a relative short term view and update as time moves on.
Sapphire disks, Rosetta project, building structures in tectonicly stable areas.
All these things have been considered.
We as a species don't have a will.
Individuals have a will, and they don't generally care what will happen 1000s of years in the future.
I believe Danny Hillis has pondered these thoughts...
http://longnow.org/
Most of the books from classical times were passed down by copying them periodically. Very few original texts from that era, save on stone. Generally educational classic or important religious works were worth copying.
It'll be hiding in the NSA Salt Mines no?
Oh sure, that will work for very low densities of information, but what about something the size of the Wikipedia? That article states that the Wikipedia has over 2.4 billion words across over 4 million articles. The article has a nice visual image of what would happen if you took all that information and printed it into 1000 page encyclopedia volumes (each containing 8 million characters). It totals over 1800 print volumes.
Now, where are you going to find that much stone writing surface in one place, and how are you going to economically carve it in a reasonable lifetime, and how are you going to arrange it in a fashion that it's human readable/explorable?
Even reproducing something immensely valuable for a recovering industrial society like Machinery's Handbook in stonework would take an immense amount of space, time, and money to do. Just something as simple as the Georgia Guidestones cost about $225,000 to do.
No, try again when you come up with something practical.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There are two parts to the problem of preserving knowledge: 1) making sure the representations we decide to use are as permanent as possible, and 2) making sure the method to decode those representations survives. The first is the relatively easy one. Carving Scarlett Johansson's face into the moon with a laser will preserve her beauty for the ages no matter what happens on earth: it would survive a nuclear holocaust, plagues, global warming, the zombie outbreak, another Bush presidency, the replacement of Europe with Westeros, and the world of Harry Potter literally becoming real. However, once the sun runs out of fuel and expands, she's toast. To survive even that, we could convert her DNA into a string of ones and zeroes and broadcast it in every direction and hope it will be eventually intercepted by Alien life "somewhere else". And then we run into problem 2. How do the Aliens figure out how to interpret Scarlett Johansson's binaries? How do they convert her back? A string of 1s and 0s of that size is massively underdetermined: many different interpretations are possible, based on the initial assumptions you make. The Aliens might make the assumption that sets of 1s and 0s should be interpreted as chemical elements (or coordinates, or light waves, or whatever), but those elements could then be arranged (sequentially!) in a vast number of vastly different ways. Not necessarily being familiar with DNA (they might not be DNA based lifeforms) they might end up making 120 pounds of goop, if they even get that close. In short, the only way to get Scarlett Johansson back from the Scarlett Johansson broadcast is to have the right decoding mechanisms in place. We're not going to be able to send along a comprehensible description of the decoding mechanism, because that would necessarily itself have to be decoded by the Aliens, leading to an infinite regress. The way we've solved this problem on earth is through culture. We're all educated by the people already here to be able to decode the information they give us (i.e., we acquire language) through interaction with our environments. Remove the people, and the decoding mechanisms disappear as well -- you can't learn to read from scratch (and for anyone who thinks he can, have a gander at linear A on wikipedia). Therefore, the only way to preserve knowledge through the ages is through a continuous chain of education down the generations. Nothing else will work. This is the only way to spread information to aliens (by direct instruction in the presence of a shared environment), and this is the only way to preserve what we have now for future generations. So, to answer the question, in order to permanently preserve knowledge for the future we need to ensure the permanent survival of culture. The only way to do this is to be fruitful and multiply, leave the solar system, and spread across the universe.
Losses from early NASA days 40 years ago illustrate the problem.
One was to the decision to use Apollo-like (moonshot) rockets and capsules to replace the space shuttle. There were some blueprints and museum pieces and personal souveniers from that era, but not complete working models. And the original engineers were dying off fast. The did successfully revive a museum piece for study.
The other losses were computer tapes and films from the early space years. Many were misplaced. Or re-recorded because they were valuble. Or the manetic tapes are fragile and decayed. They are recommended recopy every decade or could lose them. Here is sage of the moon-landing video.
that only lasts as long as there are digital computers. on the other hand, the Roman empire stamped their bitcoins into metal and you can see them in museums.
Didn't do all that great of a job, I am thinking they should have just carved something on the moon that was visible to the nekkid eye.
The NSA seems to want to save a copy of everything, forever.
Since our trash will outlast us, we should just print factoids on plastic bottles.
If you're not familiar with The Long Now Foundation you should check them out. They have a project to build a clock that will last 10,000 years (about as long again as there's been civilization on earth), and are making progress constructing it in a cave in a mountain in Nevada.
Of course, the next questions are things like "well, who is going to be around to read it?" and "how will they read it?", and "how do we maintain a level of civilization where people can create replacement parts for it?"
Neal Stephenson consulted with them for his book Anathem, which I highly recommend, which is based around these sorts of questions.
The Digital Preservation Network ( http://www.dpn.org/ )more or less has this as it's goal. Many thanks to a donor (and founder of C-SPAN) who really does worry about what would happen to our digital knowledge if civilization fell, and puts his money where his mouth is!
Any novel "ultra durable" technology will not be ubiquitous. Pre-digital age technology (aka, paper books) will be everywhere. Even though they are slowly deteriorating, just 0.1% preservation of such material will preserve a lot of knowledge because it was so widely disseminated. That's just my guess though. You can't predict the outcome of a dark age any better than you can plan it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Given religious attempts to eliminate prior âoeblasphemyâ, there is zero guarantee that some future (or current) religion wouldnâ(TM)t find our knowledge today, consider it witchcraft and destroy it. We see Islam doing this today with precious historical artworks and technology from the past. It should be considered a crime against humanity.
As they disperse through the galaxy, they replicate when enough energy and raw materials come their way. On-board they contain an information payload that relipcates along with them.
For a local copy I'd say park something outside of the area where the sun will expand as it gets older. That way if we somehow get wiped out a hard local copy is stored somewhere in the outer areas of the solar system. It's not a perfect idea but it's a bit more long term in thinking then most Earth bound solutions.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
These days a lot of information about engineering various things is possessed by companies with availability to a small group of people. When they abandon the product, the internal information may be just nuked instead of publishing it openly. Many inventions, which are useful to the humankind in general, are produced in proprietary manner. I think this is problematic.
Long term data storage is still a field where there is room for much improvement.
Here is an example of the oldest audio recording and how to play it:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/scientists-play-worlds-oldest-co.html
We could make archival disks out of something resilient like a ceramic laser disk. Maybe a tungsten carbide record cylinder?
Does anyone have any examples of resilient media like this?
In the George Pal version of H.G.Wells' "The Time Machine", the intrepid traveller comes upon a flat desk with a series of rings arrayed around. He spins a ring, and the story unfolds... a little hologram appears, with the message
"Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
Or words to that effect.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The optimists:
http://longnow.org/
the pessimists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides
the second kind doesn't need any storage of information I would think.
Some might not even call them optimists or pessimists.
Je me souviens.
Greg Bear -- Hergira
Most of the rest is cool and stuff, but way overrated. Man's quest for knowledge is the irony spelled out in the first few pages of a book despised by those described therein.
Since the NSA seems hell-bent on collecting every scrap of digital informaiton created, presumably they've worked out how to store and preserve it. I would assume their server room is well hardened.
So all future archaeologists need to do is to get in there somehow, boot it all up and have the whole of the 21st century fall open at their feet. Of course they'll be horrified at the kind of world we made for ourselves, but at least the reason for the apocalypse will be obvious, so they can avoid making that mistake again.
Convert to a Space Faring Culture. Because, what good is knowledge if no one exists to read it?
Just print out the internet.
If you want to preserve for 200 years, maybe 2000, go with deep engraving in stone. Make a lot of redundant copies, scatter them about.
If you want to preserve for MILLIONS of years, you're probably screwed, but consider putting them into cometary orbit -- so that they only return once every thousand years or so -- should make it hard for them to be intentionally destroyed by anything less than an equivilent civilization. You'll need to scatter millions of them, to have a good chance of some being found.
Part of the problem is deciding what lvl of tech is needed before they can use what you are saving. if you are saving notes on how to build a spear, then you probably just want to paint pictures. (try caves -- cave paintings have lasted a very long time)
But if you are saving notes on how to create warp drive, then you probably should put it in local orbit. Or, maybe, put it in orbit around alpha centauri...
You can't because no matter what you do entropy will always win.
Mount Rushmore creator Gutzon Borglum planned something like this: http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2007/07/hidden-hall-records-mount-rushmore
At least, not if the information is intelligently archived. The most basic stuff should be in human-readable formats, up to the information needed to create a machine to read the machine-readable information, at which point we can store everything.
After all, an iron-age society doesn't need to know to manipulate DNA, for example, because they can't, due to the lack of infrastructure. However, they can be given enough information to bootstrap themselves up to that point should they desire to do so. Since the development of transistors, or at least valves, will be a prerequisite, we can safely put the DNA-manipulation-information -- along with, why not, complete records of all DNA already sequenced, in storage devices that will require the development of transistors to read.
"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov:
http://www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf
As described here.
just encrypt it and let NSA store it FOREVER.
When the Zirkon one day encounter the burnt out husk of our planet spinning dutifully around its dying Sun, their archaelogists will find nothing remaining of our civilization except bacteria, debris, twisted girders, empty milk jugs, and scattered piles of half melted AOL CDs.
All we have to go on is humanity's experience from the previous dark ages that civilizations have already gone through. At least in those days, civilizations in different parts of the world were not as tightly synchronized as they are today. One would fail while others elsewhere flourished. But now, if one part of the world goes down, the whole planet will likely follow. Still, it's not the sudden cataclysmic event that I worry about; it's the steady slow decline as a technologically advanced population takes it all for granted and lets it all slip from their grasp. Rome did not fall in a day. Curiosity and the drive for knowledge die out. Complicated infrastructure systems are allowed to decay, then fall into disrepair, and then are abandoned. The long slow downward slide is the real threat, and no amount of survivalist prepping will be enough for the long darkness that lies ahead. Nevertheless, it does have two positive aspects: it gives you time to prepare, and the darkness does eventually end--sometimes in as little as a thousand years. So the people you want to focus on are not a plucky band of survivors trying to put the pieces back together immediately after a great catastrophe. You want find a way to assist a future renaissance many generations from now.
It seems to me that the best chance of success comes with books: printer's ink on good quality paper, properly bound---the kinds of things libraries are tossing out these days to make room for higher tech. Vellum and engraved steel are nice, but if fragments of papyrus have survived 2000 years then a well-made book, properly stored, should last a very long time indeed. You don't have to develop or prove a new technology. You don't even need to print anything new. Just collect what already exists, what most people don't value anyway. But you do want a wide variety of books: children's primers, cookbooks, and novels alongside textbooks of mathematics and medicine. Remember, it's an essentially alien culture that will find this stuff in a thousand years or more, and if they are to make any sense of the textbooks they will need to learn something about the culture that produced them. Multiple languages will help, too: think Rosetta Stone (the actual piece of rock, not the language teaching software).
You want to hide this stuff as well. As another poster pointed out already, malicious destruction is a worry. For this kind of thing you want something like the Dead Sea Scrolls, not the Library of Alexandria. Divide it all up into compartments and be reconciled to the fact that not all compartments will survive. You might even pre-spoil one or two to tip off future tomb robbers that there is no gold or silver hidden there. And since you have no way of knowing which groups of books will survive, you will want to mix them all up randomly. Whatever you do, don't sort them by category; you'd risk losing an entire branch of knowledge forever. If there are library call numbers on the book spines, the future archaeologists will figure it out somehow. Constructing a hidden repository for thousands of books would be expensive, but not astronomically so, and it should not present an insurmountable technical challenge.
The tricky part is in arranging for the people of the future renaissance to find the repository. Too obvious, it will attract vandals and tomb robbers. Too obscure, and it will be found only after civilization has already developed on its own, if then. The ideal clue would be something that would be unnoticed until civilization had just begun to redevelop: trade routes and government messenger networks are signs that civilization is beginning to rise again. What you probably want is a set of small monuments scattered over a wide area, maybe fifty or so across North America. Each monument might be shaped like an arrow, oriented to point to the repository hundreds or thousands of miles away. As safe long-distance travel develops, and as accurate surveying techniques are reinvented, people will notice that there are quite of few of these things, all pointin
Redundant array of inexpensive planets
There's no place like
..It could work..
The Scientologists have already worked this out, Google is your friend.
Build huge obelisks that are inscribed with instructions for technology. At the very bottom, instructions about how to read that script using pictures. Further up, details on how to farm and build basic shelters. Higher still (and out of sight from the ground), things like electronics, power generation, etc. Even higher (not reachable by primitive ground structures) things like nuclear power and advanced topics. Thus the populace would have all the info handy to get restarted, but wouldn't be able to use the advanced stuff until they had gotten the basics right.
Disclaimer: Not my idea. Read it in a science fiction book years ago, but cannot locate the title at the moment.
What's funny about this is that postal employees steal mail and packages all the time. I've lost a number of things (credit cards, electronics) this way. And no, the USPS and the IG don't do anything. Even though their trace logs show the package arriving at the local facility and then disappearing.
Well everything is going to the cloud nowdays. The answer is easy, we need to build a datacenter on the moon! Use some radio telescopes around the world to sync our data to the cloudy moon. We could also use an asteroid for remote off site backups as well.
Some theories posit that the population of (biologically) modern humans may have dipped down into the thousands at a few points in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans so that might be some reference.
Whether you'd want to bank the cost of a generational starship on those theories is of course another question.
It's a splendid accident that humanity has self-awareness, but I would ask how much of the information to be preserved could ever have any relevance except to humanity with curiosity very like our own. Faulty descriptions of the universe? No. Understanding of our very own genetics? No. Ancient books of ancient 'gods'? Probably not.
Broadcast core human knowledge into space in all directions, with an enormously powerful orbiting transmitter.
Eventually it might reach a civilization who would record it.
Take all the human knowledge you want to preserve and convert it to binary.
Add a decimal point before the first digit; this gives you a number between 0 and 1.
Make a notch on a metal bar that divides it exactly in that ratio.
And you're done!
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
What if the people who inherit the knowledge have an average IQ of 70 and are too stupid to be able to use it - EVER?
Does that sound like any country you know...
Brought to mind the fictional The Book of Dave in which a delusional text set in metal is recovered and misinterpreted by a post-apocalyptic society.
Stories and folklore is how knowledge is preserved for long periods of time.
Because we lose the ability to translate. Let's speak about it digitally: if you were given a floppy disk - 5.25 - with Appleworks documents on it, what is your chances of getting them readable? Almost zero. Our tech outran the storage.
Likewise, longer term, information changes because we change. Going back just 400 years, reading a 1610's manuscript would be very challenging for most people. Every 100 years would make it even more convoluted to a point where you're not able to interpret anything. Indeed, major languages of the ancient world - Linear B for instance - is only partially translated. We can only guess what they're writing.
What knowledge would you consider to be "not helpful" for future recovering populations? What would you delete from the human record of "achievement?" What would you censor? Political systems? Scientific knowledge? Technical designs? H.G. Wells "Time Machine" -- what book did he take back?
E Proelio Veritas.
The real problem is that most of the actual knowledge is practical. And that can only be transmitted in person.
As a physical species, we are not particularly interesting or outstanding, what we may want to leave behind before we come to pass, is the list, to the best of our knowledge, of what our ideals were and how and where we failed to attain them (or, to greater consternation, to achieve them!). The rest is really circumstancial detail. These lessons learnt could be engraved on tungsten tablets, in 3 languages or codes including one pictogram language and one of the languages being chosen for its grammatical simplicity. Nothing should be overlooked in the way of keys, such as indicating the top of the tablets, the order of reading, and the tablet numbers. The circumstances of how we chose to deplete or destroy our resources, let our population exceed its food and shelter support like any species of coyotes or rabbits, is of little interest. The important message to whomever or whatever may come after us should be that if reasoning function there be in a species, it should be used to supercede animal instinct, not to boost it or serve it as a damn weapon. Ideally, we do not want to plant a Foundation so that all our stupidities are perpetuated, but rather, for once, be useful to the next thinking species around this planet, should it come to happen.
... Ok, ok, hear me out: Yes, it is true, our knowledge is quite impressive to a degree, in some fields, the technological high-culture we've built these days has a significant positive impact on overall global wealth and power over the forces of nature in general, etc. jadajada ...
but: ... and a usefull overview of the laws of physics and some neat applications of those (flying, solid-state transistors, etc.)
How many things are there that really can count as a significant cornerstone of out civilisation?
- Electricity
- Internal Compustion Engine
- smithery/metal works
- arabian math & british navigation, astrology
- the wheel
- knowledge of basic hygene, virii, bacteria and genetics aka medicine
- chemistry
- experience with various modes of agriculture (4-field agriculture and nitro-ferilizer), carring crops and fruits from one continent to the next (the south-american potato definitely brought europe and the western civilisation forward)
- nuclear power
So what gives?
ICE - I'd say the internal combustion engine we could to without. Overall it has done more or at least as much damage than good, imho.
Electricity - that one definitely rocks. No other tech has brought us as far ahead as electricity.
Chemistry - not quite sure what to make of this. I'm leaning toward 'not-so-good'. Petrochem definitely has done more harm than good, I'd say. Don't like the polution. Basic knowledge of chemistry, especially in the field of medicine is neat, no doubt.
The Wheel - neat. Very usefull.
Modern Agriculture - modern agriculture sucks, however, if the insights would be applied correctly, we'd live in paradies in this area
Metal - tools: nice. means of transport: nice. Jewlery: ok. Weapons, large machinery, modern production, etc.: bad to not-so-good, imho.
Arabian math - very nice. A strike of genius, if you ask me.
Astrology - Usefull, but only to a certain extent. The past 150 years were more of pasttime in that field. Don't need to know about radiation to admire the stars.
Medicine - Very neat. Allthough I'd argue chemical medication hasn't improved that much since the 1960 - some diseases have been tackled since, but they were specifically targeted by an army of well/globally organised scientists - nothing regular humans with common sence couldn't to again. And diseases change all the time, this is an ongoing battle.
Physics, basic laws of nature - neat, very usefull.
Nuclear power - not needed, does more damage than good, especially in the hands of 99,9% of humans who are to dumb to handle it. This is one of the things I'd want *removed* from our knowledge.
All in all I'd say that in a well ordered society this knowledge could be rebuilt in 6-8 generations, roughly 200 years. Not that difficult. ... Once we have moved away from playing angry birds on smartphones to building AI to solve Big Problems (TM) that may be a totally different picture though. Then again, those big problems wouldn't be there if humanity had shown a little more brainpower while advancing in tech so fast.
Our knowledge has done far more damage than it should have, and to me it is apparent that overall inteligence isn't sufficient enough to handle todays technology correctly. A little more moral and mind training and another century or two of entlightenment before moving into hightech would've been better for humanity.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...I am offended by your phrasing. It should read "the dark ages or better."
-- thinkyhead software and media
yeah.. the later generations can just shift through our trash and make shit up like we do. much easier.
more importantly, does accurate information about this day matter? and why oh why are people now asking these questions.. for fucks sake, we are now living on the edge of eternity - and by that I mean that information about the past 50 years is so much more detailed than the fifty years prior to that(and prior to that). we are the first generation of people of who there's thousands of photos of everyone - everything is more documented than ever and stored in more ways than ever. the first days of the internet are documented forever and the first days of the computer. the first days of really, really cheap photography and centrally(and distributedly) stored diaries in addition to more people writing actual paper diaries than ever. these days will go on with humanity till the end of time. not the day when columbus found america, not the day napoleon roamed europe at will, not the days of the romans - but these days of rockets to the moon, beatles and simpsons. since the first atom bomb we have been moving towards saturation but we have not reached it yet.
these are the decades where space exploration started, people went to the moon - electronic music became to be - and records of these deeds are spread all over the globe saturating libraries, trash piles and every kind of memorabilia you can think of some of which is projected to last for thousands of years if just thrown to the garbage heap.
so why 'o why are people now asking doomsday scenarios in the vein of "how could I tell people after the catastrophe that I knew it was coming because I'm so cool so here read my manifesto about dickwaving and pray to me as a god" - yet everyone in the west is now more immortal in memory than any roman ever was - even if our population was decimated ten times consecutively.
in encyclopedia galactica more pages would be devoted to these decades than any other in human history - now or future.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The goal should not be to store all the stupidity we've learned, but to store enough to ensure people have a healthy life and a stable societal structure which would make knowledge acquisition and discovery trivial.
Second. Crystal discs engraved with information that can be projected onto a surface just by light shining through it. Basic information on how to recreate a magnifier to read the more densely engraved discs. Leave caches of these discs all over the world. Perhaps marked by descriptive menhirs, that would, you know, point out the location of the cache on astrologically significant days like the solstices.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
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The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy.
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Can't say it has got very far in the past fourteen years or longer (including early incarnations like "STELLA") though. But at least the Maker movement is heading in that direction, even without the comprehensive organization or standards.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Many ancient documents are preserved but we can no longer decipher them well because their languages are different than modern languages. Whatever we do should plan for the possibility that future societies thousands of years from now may adopt a new language. Say Esperanto or some other language gets adopted internationally and it starts picking up? Or future 'English' is much different than modern English.
Some database to associate modern words in various languages with pictures so that when people see these words in text they may know what it means. Kinda like how a baby learns a new language or how you learn something new from a physics or medical book, by seeing words and pictures. Words by themselves can't explain all new concepts very well, at some point you need/needed pictures to go along with those words. Sounds to associate the text with to know how things should be pronounced. Perhaps each letter could be associated with pictures showing how the mouth moves and in what direction air moves to produce each associated sound to start with. Perhaps some instruments and their construction and how air can move through them to produce similar sounds. That way the sounds can be re-constructed from pictures. Or some way to construct an object that creates sound based on inputting information and some information to input. Something.
Also the text should be translated into as many modern languages as possible, especially the most commonly spoken ones, to increase the chances that our future selves can find someone who can understand something.
If the past is indicative of the future we should not assume that our future selves all speak English.
Do a paper thing, stainless steel sheets bound in aluminum 'book covers', with a key book. Something that does something like Rosetta stone in teaching you language and concepts as if you are a baby, in incremental steps, and illustrates the language concepts.
These should be stashed in thousands of places on the planet, since most civilzation collapses result in fear being harvested by the maniacal, 'destray what we don't believe in' conservative periods in human history.
Rosetta, stone tablets, parchment scrolls and other works which have survived destruction only by obscurity, sleight and secrecy which instructs that the methods are not as important as the means to which you secure knowledge for posterity.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it