A Library For Survival Knowledge

TheRealHocusLocus writes: The Survivor Library is gathering essential knowledge that would be necessary to jump-start modern civilization, should it fail past the point where a simple 'reboot' is possible (video). Much of it (but not all) dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s: quaint, but we know these things work because they did work. In 1978, James Burke said our modern world has become a trap (video), and whether it springs shut or not, all survival starts with the plow. Could you make one, use one? Sure, even a steam engine to pull it. I rescued my copy of Henley's Formulas from a dumpster outside a library.

Think of the Survivor Library as a trove of survival skills, a "100-year civilization checkpoint backup" that fits on a hard drive. If one individual from every family becomes a Librarian, gathering precious things with the means to read them, there may be many candles in the darkness. Browse at will, but if acquisition is the goal, someone has kindly made a torrent snapshot as of 14-Oct-2014 available.

Comments

Re:Henley's Formulas

[o_ferguson]

Negro hair-straightener recipes too. Plus a million other toxic "remedies" made with reagents you need a federal license to secure these days.

100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Nutria]

That makes zero sense.

Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[itzly]

This. Acid free paper also makes great fuel in winter. How are you going to keep yourself warm with a pdf ?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Spy Handler]

It'd be a huge amount to print out on paper. Yes you would want to have it all on paper somewhere, but having it all on one location might be impractical except in a few cases.

However one tablet could store it all. Maybe rig a pedal-operated DC generator to power it. Bury them together inside a faraday cage.

Would a 100 year old iPad work if it were stored safely? Sure the battery would be dead but if were modified to run without a battery from external power, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work. Is this feasible?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Whiternoise]

You'd be better off burying it without the battery. Provided you knew what voltage to run it from and that Apple don't use smart batteries that have embedded ID tags (camera manufacturers sometimes do this to prevent clone batteries) you'd be fine.

Though why would you choose an iPad? I would choose something like a Toughbook - something that can actually withstand a drop and has other useful bits and pieces. It also has the benefit that it runs a full blown operating system, can be programmed and you can run all sorts of things on it. Bury it with some solar panels, one of those suitcase style chargers.

More of an issue is the lifespan of the storage. For 100 years you don't want to rely on flash. Nobody has tested modern day flash storage beyond well.. 10-15 years at most. We have a good idea of how long the drives will retain data, but it's impossible to check without waiting (some of the big cloud storage people have interesting writeups on hard drive failure rates). You want to rely on mechanical drives or really hope that those archival blu-ray discs which claim 100 year lifespans are actually worth something.

I don't see any reason why a hermetically sealed box of electronics wouldn't survive 100 years, especially if powered off.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Firethorn]

Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!

This reminded me how I'd printed out some copies of my resume on premium acid-free paper. Talk about a waste - Resumes are more temporary than just about anything else you print out. When it's likely going to be looked at for 10 minutes then discarded, and even at best it'll be worthless in 3 months, why worry about acid free?

Honestly though, I'd settle for 3 ring binder with the acid-free paper. It's a lot cheaper than a bound book, and pages can be separated out if necessary, such as pages on printing presses going to that shop, while the pages on farming go to the farms, etc...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Opportunist]

Provided DRM doesn't somehow kick in and thwart your efforts. DRM is probably going to be the biggest problem when it comes to creating a knowledge archive that way. Ponder for a moment a scenario where this reader is dead and you find one other one (of the few billions made, not so unfeasible), but will it read the book that was tied to a different reader? Will these readers work when there is nobody to phone home to?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[coaxial]

And then you drop it...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft paper. Chisle it all onto a mountain and no need to worry about it...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[korgitser]

Actually, no.
The current world will not end in a bang like some 2012 maya pipe dream, killing computers overnight. What we have at hands right now is the ongoing process of choosing by inaction not to create enough ways to harvest renewable energy. As the fossils run out, we will see a gradual shift away from our current global industrial world.
Cheap mass shipping to the other side of the world will be among the first luxuries to go, meaning we will need to start to produce most of our goods locally again, starting from the basics and working up to more complicated ones. Which is where the library kicks in. If we reasonably manage our inheritance from the industrial era, we will have quite a stretch of time available while which we can rig up a some power to a computer to read and transcribe the library. I mean, many a slashdotter will be able to rip apart that electric car into some wind generators, batteries included.
Now we can plot a simple graph with two lines - one of us exhausting and repurposing our current goods and infrastructure until we run out, the other line being us rebuilding our civilization on renewable and sustainable production and goods. What is still undecided is how low the valley will go, and whether we hit such a critical low of development that we will never come back up again.
How well this will go depends on a few factors. First, practicing any technology needs a society able to feed specialists. This ability will decline sharply everywhere, because our current agriculture is 100% about converting oil into food - there is a real possibility that billions will die of hunger. Second, some countries like the USA and GB will have to start pretty much from the beginning, having destroyed their industrial base through corporate looting and offshoring. Contrast that with China or Germany with their massive industrial base which only needs to get the power back on. Third is of course the availability of raw materials, on which point do also note the lack of plastics in a post-oil world.
And if this was too easy, expect mass migrations caused by sea level rises, thirst and hunger and wars of every size and reason to complicate matters further. Only a state with can comfortably secure it's territory, food and resources with a reasonable surplus will have a chance to actually think about a rebound. At this point we can only hope there will be one.
Or we could get off our collective arses and actually do something about the future. I seriously doubt we will see an actual global push into renewable and sustainable, though. This would require effort, resilience and actual change, all of which are in a very short supply on this scale; furthermore, it would mean replacing our power structures, ideologies and economical systems, all of which are and will fight tooth and nail to survive. So it remains that the next best thing is for us to compile some kind of a library of survival knowledge...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[ozmanjusri]

100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??? That makes zero sense.

Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!

How about publishing it to a free archive in a number of formats so thousands of people around the world can download and copy or print it to whatever medium they choose or find useful? Does that make sense?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I doubt it would work after 100 years. Capacitors dry out and no longer work after a few years of storage. There are probably more effects like this that I'm not aware of.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[rolfwind]

Cheap mass shipping to the other side of the world will be among the first luxuries to go, meaning we will need to start to produce most of our goods locally again, starting from the basics and working up to more complicated ones.

I disagree with some of this from sheer opportunity cost. Mass shipping often uses heavy fuel, the type that we have in abundance (tar sands, etc.) And this can be supplemented with wind. It's not infeasible that a future generation of shipping will return to some type of clipper ship or even kite design to help alleviate fuel.

And refridgeration is electric heavy, something we will have in abundance still besides fuel, so shipping food will still be feasible.

And trains and trucks are still more efficient than hundreds of individual cars.

If such a thing were to pass, one of the first things to go will be suburbias. A luxury of land and wastes of driving far more than distribution shipping. Since we are talking in point of the last and most wasteful step of distribution anyway, from store to home.

Such a future may come or not, not sure. Just my way of thinking.

Now, endpoint to endpoint consumer shipping from Amazon... that may be a different story. Unless quadrocopters are involved.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[catmistake]

That makes zero sense.

Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!

Printer here: Let's not muck around. To be of more use than a club, it needs to be oral tradition.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Neil Boekend]

I don't believe you are a printer. You say something else than "PC load letter".

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[aaaaaaargh!]

Would a 100 year old iPad work if it were stored safely?

No.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[denzacar]

Attaching a printed and laminated diagram on how to hold it RIGHT might help.
But it would have to have rounded corners.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[AC-x]

Wouldn't something like this (microscopically etched / electroformed solid nickel) be even better? You could include instructions for creating a microscope to read it in large print on the other side...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Ginger Unicorn]

Someone chiseled the album sleeve of Deep Purple In Rock into a mountain.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[bwcbwc]

You're assuming that an apocalyptic event would take hundreds (or at least dozens) of years before people were able to figure out how to turn these things on. There are plenty of plausible situations where the infrastructure of civilization is gone, but the relics could still work - given enough power (massive global "super-Ebola" outbreak, for example).

OTOH, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time post-apocalypse maintaining one of these. The necessity of scrounging for acid-free paper or building and maintaining a lead-acid battery and generating infrastructure make this more of a tool for groups who already have power and/or paper available for other needs.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[nospam007]

"There are plenty of plausible situations where the infrastructure of civilization is gone, but the relics could still work - given enough power (massive global "super-Ebola" outbreak, for example)."

If email still works, somebody will surely click on an attachment containing the eBola-virus and we'll all be doomed.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Lumpy]

And I would LOVE to see you carry them. Stupidity is not taking advantage of modern tech. I disagree with PDF, I think Epub or Mobi a format that works on epaper devices that can run off of small solar panels that are 5W in size.

If cared for a kindle DX can last 100 years. Unless you made the books properly by hand binding with thread and leather on very high end paper, they will not make it 100 years in use. I know this for a fact, I have several 100 year old books and they are all falling apart. Glue based binding has completely disintegrated, only the hand bound ones using thread are in good shape but even then, because the books were not read in a dark room with cotton gloves, the pages are fading and crumbling.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[captjc]

"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I wanted...! That's not fair!"

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[bwcbwc]

A lot of assumptions in both of these models. And climate change is only one failure mode of civilization that could be applicable here.
1) Global Thermonuclear War
2) Global Pandemic
3) extinction event (meteor/volcanic eruption)
4) mass civil uprisings from the 99%

This type of device _would_ be viable for specific locations where survival becomes an issue - say refugee camps or other civilian groups in war zones/famine zones, etc.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[bwcbwc]

In other words, you're advocating to restore the original works...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[swb]

I think a lot of your assumptions come with assumptions.

For example, refrigeration is electric heavy and we have a ton of coal to keep existing coal plants running, but do those steam turbines ever need replacement and where will the replacement turbines come from?

Existing refrigerators will wear out, where will you get refrigerant? Motors? The high-tech polymers used in seals and insulation? Maybe a very clever chemist and mechanical engineer could cobble together a kind of Road Warrior-style ammonia refrigerator from spare parts if they could figure out how to synthesize ammonia in quantity.

The book isn't that great, but "A World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler paints a compelling idea of what a post-technological world might look like. Pretty much everything is grown and made locally. A key subgroup runs the old landfill like a mine, painstakingly digging and sorting its content for trade -- they even disassemble houses down to the nails for materials. One group takes over an old school and digs up the asphalt parking lot and melts it to harvest the tars to fix the roof.

Everybody farms at some scale, either large-ish with animal and big human labor or with large vegetable gardens at homes. Refrigeration means ice boxes and ice houses, harvesting winter ice ala 1800s. Everybody grows a small patch of poppies which the doctor uses to make laudanum, the only anesthesia for any kind of serious medical situation.

"Trade" involves small-scale river traffic of agricultural goods and is a serious gamble as one of the narratives involves the boats and their cargo being basically pirated. Another narrative device is the lack of wheat bread, a rust infection keeps any serious wheat crop from being raised, leaving them eating corn or flaxseed bread. Metals are in short supply in a narrative gimmick based on the last major war recycling anything available, so there's almost no junked cars for scrap metal.

The book itself is so-so, but the ideas involved in a world basically only missing fossil fuels is pretty interesting.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[dcw3]

they will not make it 100 years in use. I know this for a fact...

You forgot to tell these people... http://entertainment.howstuffw...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[mrchaotica]

Cheap mass shipping to the other side of the world will be among the first luxuries to go, meaning we will need to start to produce most of our goods locally again, starting from the basics and working up to more complicated ones.

We don't need to "start" producing goods locally "again," because we never stopped. Some local industries may be a lot smaller, but they still exist. In my city, you can even buy locally-made shoes (if you're willing to pay the exorbitant price).

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[mrchaotica]

A key subgroup runs the old landfill like a mine, painstakingly digging and sorting its content for trade -- they even disassemble houses down to the nails for materials.

These things already happen. Mining landfills may not be common in the US (except for gathering methane), but it happens elsewhere. Carefully deconstructing houses to gather "reclaimed" building materials happens even here. (Hipsters will pay big bucks for old wood, you know.) In fact, even houses that aren't carefully deconstructed still get at least recycled (with the concrete being made into new concrete, the wood being made into paper products, etc.), which is why in many cities you're not supposed to put construction debris in with the regular trash.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[StripedCow]

Still makes no sense, because of this quote:

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

(Carl Sagan)

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[AmiMoJo]

Container ships won't go away, they will just grow enormous sails and take a bit longer to arrive.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[turp182]

I really enjoyed A World Made By Hand. I'm not sure if you are aware, but there are two more books in the series at this point. The Witch of Hebron came out a over a year ago. "A History of the Future" was released very recently.

If you are into this sort of literature (I might be overplaying the word there, but they are books...), Patriots is a pretty good yarn. It's also very applicable to this article on survival knowledge, it's a fictional story combined very directly with extreme preparation and survival skills (tons of gun info, literally tons; and home prep, radio comms, location scouting, how to destroy tanks, etc.).

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[toolie]

One of the best episodes ever.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[drinkypoo]

The current world will not end in a bang like some 2012 maya pipe dream, killing computers overnight.

is it actually impossible for some kind of solar activity to fry "all" (more or less) of the fine-process semiconductors? serious question.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

In any disaster like they are talking about, 90% of Slashdot users will have died in a week due to lack of water.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not put it on microfilm, and store it with a mechanical microfilm reader?

All a reader needs is some power for the light bulb. You could even use natural light and a mirror.
Microfilm chemistry is very well understood, and could last for thousands of years.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[njnnja]

some countries like the USA and GB will have to start pretty much from the beginning, having destroyed their industrial base through corporate looting and offshoring

I can't speak for GB but the USA is the world's second largest manufacturer. Or does it only count as industry if it looks like Pittsburgh in 1950 instead of California in 2014?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

"And if this was too easy, expect mass migrations caused by sea level rises"

These migrations would happen anyway. I'd also expect that as people were dying of hunger, the migration would be towards water as fishing would be an available food source(as well as hunting near water sources), and irrigation(without large pumps to get water out of the ground) would be needed for crops to sustain civilization beyond the immediate future.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the intent of pdf files is that they will be copied and printed out. It is easier to disseminate pdf file than to disseminate actual books.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[pherthyl]

I couldn't disagree more.
The tough book will use far more power than the iPad so much harder to keep it running.
You don't want anything with mechanical fans to suck dirt into places
You want solid state. Flash might not last 100 years but mechanical drives definitely won't.

iPad in a good case would be far more useful than a laptop

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[plopez]

How do you load and unload them without heavy cranes? Or distribute the goods without energy intense transporttion? Is there enough draft animals in the world to keep it going? What about fodder and vet services for the animals, etc?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[itzly]

Nobody has tested lifetime of last generation microelectronics either. With feature sizes down to just a few atoms, it doesn't take a lot of migration for the CPU to stop working.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[rasmusbr]

Don't worry, I've bookmarked the page on my smartphone. Shoot me an email if the apocalypse happens!

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Howstuffworks is not a place for accurate information.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're forgetting the lowest common denominator - the regular joes (and the sub-regular joes). People who live hand-to-mouth will be the first to stir up trouble if our current level of civilization stops working for them. When people go hungry, there isn't anything they won't do (theft, murder, cannibalism...) to survive. Sure, the average slashdotter might be able to whip up a wind generator using a Prius - if they still have the Prius, if the mob hasn't knocked down their door and killed them and their entire family.

Most households have only a few days of food on hand, some lower-income households have less than that. Things will go mad-max in a hurry when the food runs out.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[miowpurr]

That one and "Living Doll". Perhaps along with knowledge, folks should store a pair or two of reading glasses?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[BCGlorfindel]

What we have at hands right now is the ongoing process of choosing by inaction not to create enough ways to harvest renewable energy. As the fossils run out, we will see a gradual shift away from our current global industrial world.

No.

We have enough oil to maintain the status quo usage for another 30+ years. Tesla motors though makes it clear that gas guzzling cars will be replaced by electrics in less than 30 years. Not for the sake of renewable energy or environmental conscience, but because they are cheaper, faster and all around superior. More over, I firmly believe that the next 30 years will see the advancement of some form of fusion power. Lockheed Martin has even been willing to claim, publicly, that it will have a fusion reactor ready for market in 10.

But Fusion isn't even necessary to maintain our current post-industrial path forwards. Sufficient advances in batteries and existing fission power suffice. Domestic shipping on highways by electric trucks or trains using batteries charged from fission power plants. Ocean transport either in short ranges with batteries, but more likely even larger transports powered by military style on board fission reactors actually able to REDUCE cost and increase speed of international transport of goods.

All the doomsday gloomy predictions of a future that will falter because we can't possibly solve problem X tend to fail.

Violence against one another is about the only threat to our future, we have technology of such a state that we are otherwise pretty well situated for centuries of continued growth.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

> How are you going to keep yourself warm with a pdf ?

I'll burn my DaVinci scrolls and I'll like it!

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[BCGlorfindel]

Cheap mass shipping to the other side of the world will be among the first luxuries to go, meaning we will need to start to produce most of our goods locally again, starting from the basics and working up to more complicated ones.

I disagree with some of this from sheer opportunity cost. Mass shipping often uses heavy fuel, the type that we have in abundance (tar sands, etc.) And this can be supplemented with wind. It's not infeasible that a future generation of shipping will return to some type of clipper ship or even kite design to help alleviate fuel.

And refridgeration is electric heavy, something we will have in abundance still besides fuel, so shipping food will still be feasible.

And trains and trucks are still more efficient than hundreds of individual cars.

If such a thing were to pass, one of the first things to go will be suburbias. A luxury of land and wastes of driving far more than distribution shipping. Since we are talking in point of the last and most wasteful step of distribution anyway, from store to home.

Such a future may come or not, not sure. Just my way of thinking.

Now, endpoint to endpoint consumer shipping from Amazon... that may be a different story. Unless quadrocopters are involved.

We'll adopt civilian nuclear reactors on massive sea transports first. We have the existing technology to build massive ocean transports powered by uranium, that need refuelling 2-3 times per CENTURY. We just need to decide to build them. If the need arises and we do, they'll even drastically REDUCE the cost of international ocean shipping.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[SuiteSisterMary]

And the first few chapters should detail how to build and operate a printing press.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

If I were going to store these electronically, I'd include a solar charger for the electronic display device (tablet, laptop, etc.) as well as a manual one.

If you were going to print these documents out, I probably wouldn't use paper. When I worked at the university library in college, we had a large machine storing I don't know how many microfiche. You could fit a whole reference book on a sheet barely larger than an index card and store hundreds of those books in a shoebox. In addition, as long as you have the ability to create a magnifying lens and a light source, you could theoretically project the information on a wall or screen -- you wouldn't necessarily need a highly technical reader to view the text. As long as the books include only text and black-and-white drawings, this seems like a good archival medium -- and the Wikipedia page gives a reference claiming a lifetime of 500 years.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple doesn't* use smart batteries

Apple equates to an it, not a plural, so you use doesn't instead of don't.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tibit]

Mobile electronics, especially thin ones, don't use any capacitors that could dry out. The ones that do dry out are the aluminum electrolytic types. Modern mobile stuff is all ceramic capacitors with a few tantalums sprinkled here and there, if at all. The only real concern is solder whisker growth and finite data retention times of flash memory. I'd expect a 100 year old battery-less iPad to be perfectly electrically OK and ready to have its firmware and storage re-flashed :) Perhaps we need a hardwire logic paper tape reader with a JTAG interface.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[kenaaker]

That depends on whether you know where the stored reading glasses are. I spent a couple of hours one time searching for my glasses because I hurriedly put them on top of the refrigerator and then couldn't see well enough to spot them. I felt a lot of sympathy for that character when I saw that episode again.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[brainboyz]

Patriots was a horrible book. Stories like One Second After, Lights Out, and Lucifer's Hammer (slow story, but well thought out) were much better.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[brainboyz]

The processors themselves? Unlikely. The power grid and everything plugged into it? Very possible. For all intents and purposes, that would take civilization down in quite the bang.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tehcyder]

While the end of civilisation would be generally a Bad Thing, the thought of never having to read the phrase "Adobe Software" again would almost make it worth while.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[DiscoSnorlax]

Could go back to refrigerators more like the old GE Monitor Top ones (some of which are still working since the late '20s and '30s). Not much in the way of high-tech polymers - they're insulated with corrugated cardboard and used refrigerants like Sulfur Dioxide or Methyl Formate. Or for a more modern refrigerator, if all it needs is recharged, in a pinch find a tank of propane - a.k.a. R290. For the motors, I'm sure someone could rewind it if needed with wire scavenged from bigger, less useful motors.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

the way they unloaded the ships of old using Block and tackle, ,muscle power, etc.

This is a problem that was solved long ago.

Generally seeing people making mountains out of molehills in this thread. Life will go on. It will be hard for the survivors but they will... survive.

Learn to make fire, Learn to work wood and metal. Study basic household chemistry. That way you have some skill to trade if it does come to pass if it doesn't at least you have a fun set of skills as a hobby.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

There was an episode of the animated series "The Batman" (specifically "Artifacts" in season 4) where future archaeologists find the Batcave in an attempt to find information that will enable them to defeat Mr. Freeze. Turns out Batman had had his database of information on criminals etched into the titanium supports of the Cave for just such a possibility.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tehcyder]

Apple doesn't* use smart batteries

Apple equates to an it, not a plural, so you use doesn't instead of don't.

In the UK we quite often refer to organisations/corporations in the plural (e.g. "Tesco are cutting the price of petrol" or "BP are guilty of appalling safety management").

I'm not sure if there's a rule about when you're allowed or supposed to do it, but that's irrelevant if people do anyway.

tl;dr OP might be English, sorry British

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tibit]

You don't have to be a hipster to appreciate old wood. It's simply more dimensionally stable than new wood. Same goes for most other materials - they age those piano frames for the same reason. If you need dimensionally stable wood (as much as a given wood species can be), you need old wood, pure and simple.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tibit]

The cost of international ocean shipping is already laughably low, IMHO.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tibit]

Sure it's possible, but if that happens, all of the living things will be permanently deleted as well. The surface-level effects of solar storms aren't on semiconductors at all, but on long metallic structures, a.k.a. power lines. Heck, they only manifest themselves because current AC long-haul systems are DC-coupled. All it takes to make the power grid laugh at geomagnetic storms is to add capacitive coupling at one end of each line. That's it. You open the circuit for the low-frequency currents and the problem is solved. The transformers get damaged by geomagnetic-storm induced DC/low-freq currents because those currents easily saturate the cores, and now instead of a transformer you've got a resistor bank, and the overcurrent protection devices are designed for AC and act as short-circuits at DC - they mechanically open, but the DC arc keeps on going, so the fact that they are open is irrelevant. If you ever look at a circuit breaker or a switch, the units with a given DC current rating are an order of magnitude larger in volume than the units rated for a given AC current.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[tibit]

I hope you're not serious. Sure, museum artifacts last longer, but if you're after preservation they're useless for their intended purpose. A book that you can't read isn't good for much.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[swb]

WMH I liked but WoH introduced too much metaphysical crap -- the religious group and its telekinetic leader and the strange, godlike woman at its core were too much. I wanted to read about the post-technological world, not a quasi-fantasy world populated by near-magical peoples.

I didn't know there was a book 3 out, I'll have to look into it.

I also think he had too many excuses/gimmicks for arbitrarily eliminating some kinds of technology. I would have thought that there would be more "at home" electricity through the adaptation of car batteries and car alternators adapted to work as generators. I read another post-oil type book where these were common.

His paved roads were all reduced to rubble in a really short time. I would assume that without car traffic roads would last a long time -- my residential street is asphalt with a gravel/tar sealcoat and it hasn't been rebuilt in the 15 years I've lived there and shows almost no wear. My uncle owned a farm on a trunk highway in Kansas. In the 1950s they moved the road a mile away and the old trunk highway became a county road. Traffic is low but the road never deteriorated in any meaningful way over 50-some years.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[cayenne8]

We could always try transcribing it to cave walls which seem to have survived millions of years so far....?

:)

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Chelloveck]

More over, I firmly believe that the next 30 years will see the advancement of some form of fusion power.

I remember first reading that fusion was "only 20 years away" back in the 70s. By the time I graduated high school in 1984 I knew it was kind of stalled but I was certain that we'd have it within 30 years. *sigh* Those were the days. The future was much brighter back then.

Lockheed Martin has even been willing to claim, publicly, that it will have a fusion reactor ready for market in 10.

And I really hope they're right. I'm just not going to bet on it until someone demonstrates a sustained net-positive output. Once that happens I figure it'll be 10 years until a commercial-scale plant can be designed, get regulatory approval, and actually brought online. (And I'm probably way optimistic on the regulatory approval part!)

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[smaddox]

Violence against one another is about the only threat to our future, we have technology of such a state that we are otherwise pretty well situated for centuries of continued growth.

Continued growth at the current rate is not possible with any energy source for more than about 2 centuries. In 275 years, we would have to collect 20% of all the sunlight falling on earth. If we used local fusion reactors, we would very rapidly heat the earth beyond habitability. If we want to survive as a species, we'll have to transition to a steady state society in relatively short order.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[AdamHaun]

If cared for a kindle DX can last 100 years.

On what do you base that statement? Consumer-grade electronic devices are not designed to last that long. Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode, copper in IC traces migrates and shorts out, batteries wear out. I don't know about LCDs, but I'm sure they have long-term failure modes too, especially if they're exposed to sunlight. The whole device will be exposed to temperature extremes due to the lack of air conditioning in a survival situation. I'll buy 20-30 years. But 100? No way.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[davester666]

the server's will be down anyway, so even if the software launched, it wouldn't let you read anything because no Adobe server is present to monitor which documents you have open and which pages you have read.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Plazmid]

Why not do something like the Rosetta Projectand etch all the pages on to a mass produced metal disk?

And if you don't limit yourself to the requirement that the text be optically readable, you could make 'Feynman's Library,' use modern semiconductor lithography processes to etch the entire library of congress onto something the size of a library card(and in some sturdy material that ).

For the most part we have the technology to do this, the only big difficulty with doing such a thing(aside from scanning all the books!) would be getting liscensing to 'print' all the books in the library of congress.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Nutria]

if you don't limit yourself to the requirement that the text be optically readable

Also totally useless for the requirement of restarting an industrial civilization.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

"Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode"

none of those are present in a Kindle.

"LCDs, but I'm sure they have long-term failure modes too"

Again, "that does not exist in a kindle, I think you dont know what a kindle is... you might want to look one up and see what it is and how they are built.

"The whole device will be exposed to temperature extremes due to the lack of air conditioning in a survival situation. I'll buy 20-30 years. But 100? No way."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... - you cant get more "temperature extreme" than what this experiences. and it has "electronics" in it. It's over 45 years old (they did not build it just before launch, they had been building for a while) and it is still working.. so your 20-30 years guess is off by a factor of 2 already and that is based on insanely old tech.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Whiternoise]

Do you think an IP rated Toughbook has fans to suck dirt in?

They're designed solely for surviving dirty, messy, wet and otherwise harsh environments. Panasonic also make IP68 rated tablets - dust ain't a problem. I only say Panasonic because I've used them at work and they do what they claim, there are other manufacturers to look at.

It's a trade off. The iPad is frankly flimsy for an apocalypse scenario. I would trade off long charge times for knowledge that I can't break the thing. Also a laptop is slightly more user serviceable than a tablet, e.g. if you need to swap out the main hard drive or RAM.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Whiternoise]

British ;)

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[cbeaudry]

Plus you can add this to the kit to power it.

http://www.powerpractical.com/...

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[coaxial]

Pfft, just the corners off. That way you'll be prepared when the robots come to kill you.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[AdamHaun]

"Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode"

none of those are present in a Kindle.

Those were generic examples. A better one for a mobile device might have been that the contacts on the charging port wears out. Based on the rest of your post I'm skeptical that you know anything about the components used to make Kindles, but I didn't design it so I won't speculate further.

I apologize for the LCD/E-Ink confusion. But it doesn't make a difference because neither of them are designed to last for 100 years. According to the company, they expect that "over 90% of E Ink displays will last more than 10 years with typical usage", where "typical usage" is defined as room temperature. Kindles are rated for operation between 0 - 35 C (32 - 95 F), and discussion on Amazon suggests that this is a real limitation. That range is similar to what LCDs can handle. I suspect that both are limited by a chemical breakdown process (which would happen exponentially faster at higher temperatures) but I don't know enough about displays to say for sure.

you cant get more "temperature extreme" than what [Voyager 1] experiences. and it has "electronics" in it.

If you think that a space probe is in any way comparable to a consumer e-reader, then I'm afraid you don't understand anything at all about electronics or engineering. Had you kept reading on Wikipedia, you might have found stuff like this:

The Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) and a single eight-track digital tape recorder (DTR) provide the data handling functions.

The digital control electronics of the Voyagers were based on RCA CD4000 radiation-hardened, silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) custom-made integrated circuit chips, combined with standard transistor-transistor logic (TTL) integrated circuits.

Electrical power is supplied by three MHW-RTG radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). They are powered by plutonium-238 ... and provided approximately 470 W at 30 volts DC when the spacecraft was launched. Plutonium-238 decays with a half-life of 87.74 years ... Additionally, the thermocouples that convert heat into electricity also degrade, reducing available power below this calculated level. By 7 October 2011 the power generated by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had dropped to 267.9 W and 269.2 W respectively, about 57% of the power at launch ... As the electrical power decreases, spacecraft loads must be turned off, eliminating some capabilities.

Voyager-1 was designed from the ground up for reliability in a hostile environment. I can't find a price for the hardware itself, but you can bet it was a more than $100, probably by several zeros. And even so, it's looking like the power supply will fail before it turns 100. A Kindle is nowhere near that level of reliability. It doesn't need it and nobody wants to pay for it.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[mikelieman]

Solar power collectors in GEO and phase-locked beamed microwave to groundstations. 1970's technology. Energy problem solved. Next?

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

The Romans did it.

Most of their olive oil came from Spain. They had luxuries from all over the world. They had cranes to lift heavy loads too.

After Columbus and the spaniards came to the new world, you had sugar and tea and tobacco travel to all parts of the world.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[beastofburdon]

As far as the drive goes you certainly want a platter hard drive or possibly a tape drive. Flash will only last a couple of years without power and your average CD is likely to start degrading after 10-15 years. There are some CD's that claim to last up to 100 years, but that has not been tested. A standard hard drive, or tape fails from use, not from sitting there without power like the other two. It will eventually degrade without use, but that will take a very long time.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[beastofburdon]

That looks awesome!
It appears to be based on a large array of thermocouples which are very reliable and would last for hundreds if not thousands of years if treated well. The real limitation would be the voltage regulator used with it.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[beastofburdon]

Except it could only hit half the globe at a time. The other half will have forewarning and will be able to disconnect most equipment from the grid to save it. From there it will be a matter of repopulating that equipment to the other half of the world.

Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[beastofburdon]

These are formats that there are many free readers and converters for. Your argument is invalid.

Already available

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out all those Palladin Press book scans on your nearest torrent site, right between the CIA survival training manual and the Anarchist cookook.

I approve

[haedus]

Sounds good to me.

Jeep.

[o_ferguson]

Used to be you could get a plow attachment for your jeep.

Re:Jeep.

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Go back far enough and you could get a tractor conversion kit for your model T.

Re:Jeep.

[Anonymous Coward]

If your jeep has a trailer hitch, then it's still possible - they even sell them for lawn tractors...(Google lawn tractor bottom plow!)

Re:Jeep.

[onepoint]

Funny, but I went immediately to the ink section (I like fountain pens, and sometimes you are required to use special inks) in Henleys, and they were all interesting (page 399 and 400). I have to guess some of these inks are amazing.

But more to the point, Why not print a book like this or buy a book like this and just keep in case of that frightful day. I think its 800+ pages are well worth the shelf space.

The Knowledge

[Mr 44]

Various people have been mulling this idea around before, summary could do a better job of giving credit to previous works. Primarily, Lewis Dartnell's recent book, The Knowedge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch covers exactly this topic quite well.

Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latestâ"or even the most basicâ"technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself?

  Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You canâ(TM)t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesnâ(TM)t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them allâ"the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself.

Re:The Knowledge

[fustakrakich]

Waddya mean "previous works"? That is 20 dollar hipster version, published this year of what's offered in the article for free, written by people who actually had to make and do stuff.

And pimping Amazon...

Re:The Knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

And he borrowed heavily from:

George R. Stewart's 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel "Earth Abides"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides

Re:The Knowledge

[RabidReindeer]

You canâ(TM)t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity

Interesting example of where you can seriously jumpstart things. People were drawing wire back in ancient times, and regardless of what they actually were, we know that even batteries were being built back then. The old "cat whisker" style receiver required only a coil of wire, a galena (semiconductor) crystal, and some sort of earphone, which is basically another coil of wire and a thin ferromagnetic metal plate.

Transmitters are harder, since you need oscillating circuits, not to mention more power (especially if the receiver is un-amplified). However, the technology required to create evacuated glass vacuum tubes was pretty much all there since about the mid-late 1700s. What we lacked at the time was knowing how to put it all together.

It all falls apart in the last 50 years, though. Solid-state circuitry can only go so far using natural crystals. You need refining and purification, vacuum deposition and microscopic masking, and undoutably even more things I have no knowledge. You'd need not only tons of technical information, but massive computing facilities to get it all worked out. Obviously, it's not impossible, since we did it once already in under half a century, but I'm not convinced you can jump-start it as easily as older electronic technology could be. And, of course, to do it in 50 years or less, it helps to have most of the other parts of the modern world restored to functionality at the same time. Hard to run a fab factory if it takes most of the workforce to pull plows.

Re:The Knowledge

[jeffb (2.718)]

Transmitters are harder, since you need oscillating circuits, not to mention more power (especially if the receiver is un-amplified). However, the technology required to create evacuated glass vacuum tubes was pretty much all there since about the mid-late 1700s. What we lacked at the time was knowing how to put it all together.

Remember Morse code and CW transmission? Generating loads of RF is easy -- you need a big stack of batteries, a spark gap, and an antenna. In fact, a spinning sulfur ball and a silk brush could probably generate enough current at high voltage to do the trick. I'm thinking you can even do AM voice without a conventional "amplifying" device, if you aren't concerned about pleasing audiophiles.

I'm almost all in on continued technological progress -- I'm not sure I'd want to live in a collapsed, post-tech civilization. But I've accumulated quite a few hardcopy books about "how stuff works", how to build lab equipment, "amateur science", and the like. I've always been the geek, and I'd have to count on others for basic agricultural and military/survivalist knowledge, but I figure I'd have some value to offer. If nothing else, I'll bet I could build the best stills in the district, and I might be able to give them a leg up on antibiotics and other life-science stuff...

Re:The Knowledge

[RabidReindeer]

In fact, a spinning sulfur ball and a silk brush could probably generate enough current at high voltage to do the trick.

You're hired!

Actually, current doesn't matter as much as voltage, but if crude spark technology is all you want, I'd say you've got it down.

I had a "radio set" that consisted of an unplugged transistor amplifier, a speaker, and the wire running from the speaker to the amp. Because I lived across the street from a 5KW AM radio transmitter, it would whisper eerily in the dark. The final-stage transistors replaced the galena rectifier/demodulator, the speaker wire served as antenna and the speaker served as... well, what do you think?

A friend had me beat though. Across the street from him was a 100KW FM transmitter. He said the light bulb in his medicine cabinet used to sing to him.

I have the Foxfire books. So I have old-time know-how at my disposal. Although I'm going to have to turn vegetarian when it comes to the hog-slaughtering part, bacon or no bacon. I've been doing a kitchen garden for years, though, and it's now quite obvious why certain foods and spices are stereotypical to the region!

Re:The Knowledge

[jeffb (2.718)]

Thanks, but it's the kind of job I hope I never have to take...

It actually is current that matters, I think -- voltage is important largely for driving rapid changes in current, but if you don't have enough current-generation capacity, your load will limit either your voltage or the rate at which you can make sparks.

I really need to lay in copies of the Foxfire books, too. Again, I view it as hedging against something that I really hope doesn't happen -- but they're interesting reading regardless, and sometimes they'll suggest an idea that's quite useful even in our tech-besotted present.

Hair Dryer

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the industrial strength hair dryer? I couldn't live without it.

Re:Hair Dryer

[Anonymous Coward]

Without electricity you're doomed to a life of flat hair, unless you create a set of bellows, and someone to work them. But if it's that dire a world situation, your coif would be the least of your problems.

Re:Hair Dryer

[Opportunist]

Move to Kansas, wait for tornado season...

Wanna survive?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.rarefile.net/1g1jay...
http://www.rarefile.net/1rqsbc...
http://www.rarefile.net/vk0a8p...
http://www.rarefile.net/ecqwwr...

interesting, questionable

[Tom]

I wonder what "embalming" does in a survivor handbook, but maybe that's just me being a semantics nazi.

The idea is cute. The format is wrong. This absolutely must be a printed book or it will not serve its purpose. Because if any scenario that requires it happens, then two things will follow within a reasonably short frame of time: a) power will fail, both mains and whatever battery or generators you have and b) it is highly unlikely that you'll have an opportunity to print it all before that happens.

It also needs to be edited, which is why "you can print it out yourself" is not a proper answer to my remark above. When I'm fighting for survival, I won't have time to search through a huge volume of information to figure out what I need right now. Some things I'll know to look for, of course, but much information will be of the "you only know it's important if you already know about it" kind.

Also, it completely lacks sections on psychology, sociology and politics. While as sciences, these are fairly young and just beginning to deliver applicable results, there is a lot in there that can help small groups under pressure to perform better and manage their social dynamics as well as mental health.

Finally, it lacks a section of advanced technology. Yes, if civilization crashes, we'll be back to horses and plowing the fields for one or two generations, but why should we have to re-invent everything about computers, networks, planes, rockets, medicine and so on? Some of this stuff took decades and lives lost to figure out.

Re:interesting, questionable

[itzly]

why should we have to re-invent everything about computers...

No, we will be dead. Somebody else gets the opportunity to invent them for the first time.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Spy Handler]

Also, it completely lacks sections on psychology, sociology and politics.

And women's studies, and bunch of other "studies". I imagine this is a feature, not a bug.

Sounds like they took useful things from the current civilization and threw out the junk. Sensible.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe something like this?

Chapter 19 - Politics
How we did it back then was we gathered up in entities we called "countries". Each country spent a sizable percent of its population's income to build weapons. The strongest countries built so called weapons of mass destruction. Those are the reason you are reading this.
End of chapter. 19.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

A reboot would be a nice chance to erase patriarchy before it forms, and as such some information would be needed in order to counteract all known forms of patriarchal advancement. (And to warn against matriarchal as well; gender apartheid is evil, regardless of who is master and slave)

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what "embalming" does in a survivor handbook, but maybe that's just me being a semantics nazi.

But this is not just a survivor book. It also deals with what happens after you manage to survive.

The idea is cute. The format is wrong. This absolutely must be a printed book or it will not serve its purpose. Because if any scenario that requires it happens, then two things will follow within a reasonably short frame of time: a) power will fail, both mains and whatever battery or generators you have and b) it is highly unlikely that you'll have an opportunity to print it all before that happens.

The format is just right: the sheer volume of text makes it highly unpractical for printing. It would also mean there would be just several copies printed. You can't really use a book that weighs over 20kg and is stashed in several rooms of a building hundreds of kilometers away. Also, I'm investing in a ebook reader with a eink display and a hand-cranked dynamo usb charger. Hopefully this will work long enough.

It also needs to be edited, which is why "you can print it out yourself" is not a proper answer to my remark above. When I'm fighting for survival, I won't have time to search through a huge volume of information to figure out what I need right now. Some things I'll know to look for, of course, but much information will be of the "you only know it's important if you already know about it" kind.

Ah, what you want is a simple survival guidebook. I'm fairly certain there are several in there. Just print one of those.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

If you with to find a solid granite mountain range and bore a tunnel through it then laser engrave the walls with all the non-fiction know to humanity, go ahead, I would except I don't have the time or money to do it myself.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some unfortunate news for you. A civilization collapse, especially given the recent history of feminism, will result in a patriarchy that will even make old school Arabs envious. The luxury of a moral crisis gets tossed as soon as survival is at stake. Modern day feminism can only exist in a world of excess.

Not that I put much stock in evo psych, but it is hard to argue against sexual dimorphism. Expect women to be reduced too little more than baby factories, and without the romanticism that the "patriarchy" afforded them previously.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

We can leave the politics out, thanks. They've just proven solely just by the collapse of society that the current political system is complete fail.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

A reboot would be a nice chance to erase patriarchy before it forms, and as such some information would be needed in order to counteract all known forms of patriarchal advancement. (And to warn against matriarchal as well; gender apartheid is evil, regardless of who is master and slave)

.....aaaaaaaaaand, the cycle repeats.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. In the kind of world this book is talking about women are chattel bromaldehyde.

Re:interesting, questionable

[DarkOx]

That is an interesting long view. I have always held the premise if society collapses it goes without saying it will be because some event triggers a massive depopulation. War/famine/plague etc. We are simple to dependent on technology to just let our high tech world go. The last think the powers that be will give up on is keeping the lights burning, and semi-trailers rolling. Without those things THEY HAVE NO POWER.

Nobody is going to listen to the current body of politicians without the the military to back them up and few soildures and police persons will hang around once the paychecks stop coming and they know their loved ones at back home starving in the dark. No the lights will stay on till just about the last (possibly with brief interruptions).

So if you happen to be one of the survivors after the lights have gone out. You won't find yourself in a world of 8B people needing to eat. So the less efficient solutions of the past will be perfectly adequate. A horse or cow can pull a plow thru a field, animal fat and properly shaped chimney over a round wick will make a fine lamp. These are things someone with even an American Highschool education probably can work out.

You are right that body of knowledge will really only be useful after things start normalizing a bit, after a social structure emerges. Nobody going to have time create all the inputs for a steam tractor, no matter how useful having it would be for a while. Either their will be a left over ICE machine folks will modify to run on pig fact it will be the horse and ox for power until stuff settles down.

Re:interesting, questionable

[c]

I wonder what "embalming" does in a survivor handbook, but maybe that's just me being a semantics nazi.

I was kinda curious about who decided "A Manual of Gothic Moldings" would be of substantial value for survivor knowledge.

It's an interesting idea, but it really needs to be curated better to separate out the "needs" and "wants".

Re:interesting, questionable

[operagost]

As far as "politics" goes, at least having a copy of Robert's Rules of Order might be useful.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

The format is just right: the sheer volume of text makes it highly unpractical for printing. It would also mean there would be just several copies printed. You can't really use a book that weighs over 20kg and is stashed in several rooms of a building hundreds of kilometers away.

It's not a single book. It's a library. A collection of books.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

I was kinda curious about who decided "A Manual of Gothic Moldings" would be of substantial value for survivor knowledge.

Knowing how to produce intricate patterns in wood (or stone) is a useful skill. People like pretty things. If I can keep myself fed, my skills sharp, and my equipment maintained because the people in my village want pretty things, the scientist or engineer who needs something machined in an arbitrary shape to within a certain tolerance now has access to someone who can do it.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be multiple levels of this information. The basic survival should be something people would be able memorize and teach to others. The technology and science level depend on the capability and execution of the earlier levels, and the available resources. For example, producing modern metal objects would be quite hard without lots of available electricity. Perhaps a whole, alternative branch of technology should be developed for such times, one witch wouldn't be as hard to bootstrap without easily available, massive amounts of fossil fuels. Who knows, maybe a manned Mars mission forces somebody to develop such that.

Re:interesting, questionable

[c]

the scientist or engineer who needs something machined in an arbitrary shape to within a certain tolerance now has access to someone who can do it.

Well, no.

That's a distinctly different skill, and covered largely by "Woodworking Turning Patternmaking and More" or any of the works called "Pattern-Making" (which darned well should be part of a survival library). And you'll find that the results tend to be the exact opposite of "pretty" (sanding wood perfectly smooth tends to be incompatible with precise tolerances, and in practice patterns used a lot of (flat black) paint and wood filler).

Gothic (or any other type of architectural molding) is the exact opposite of precise. It's intended to be banged out in quantity, often by multiple craftsman, and inaccuracies are largely masked by repetition and the sheer scale of the works, and the specific patterns and styles are driven largely by fashion and trends of the period. In other words, most of those kinds of "books" are more like catalogs than instruction manuals.

I'm not saying there might not be any value in having them, but there should be a distinct separation between "needs" and "wants".

Re:interesting, questionable

[Tom]

You are right that body of knowledge will really only be useful after things start normalizing a bit, after a social structure emerges.

I think the primary mistake of pretty much all apocalypse scenarios is always the "total anarchy" part. As much as some dreamers wish it, humans simply aren't that way. We are social animals and the chances that group dynamics survive and families, tribes or other units of people, especially if they already know each other and learnt to trust each other (sports teams, military teams, etc.) fighting for survival is much, much higher than an "everyone for himself" scenario.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Tom]

There's a difference between the knowledge about or science of politics and the current political realities. Knowing about politics and especially history is the only hope survivors would have of repeating all our (and our ancestors) mistakes.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Tom]

But this is not just a survivor book. It also deals with what happens after you manage to survive.

So much is obvious just from the list of titles. It still makes no sense. Embalming has never in human history been used in a society struggling with survival. It's a luxury technique.

Also, I'm investing in a ebook reader with a eink display and a hand-cranked dynamo usb charger. Hopefully this will work long enough.

It will not. One generation is th other of magnitude of lifetime for pretty much all our current electronics. Do you think a scenario that requires this kind of library will bring society back to a state where it'll be able to have functioning printers and USB readers again? If so, the library desperately needs the specifications for USB, the ebook file format and a ton more that'll be necessary to preserve your ebook for longer than the lifetime of your setup.

Ah, what you want is a simple survival guidebook.

No, you misunderstood completely what I meant. Good editing doesn't mean short and simple. It means accessible and organized.

Re:interesting, questionable

[Tom]

And women's studies, and bunch of other "studies".

Way to do a 180 on my point.

There's a massive difference between empirical studies of "how do these strange beings we call humans work" and political pseudo-sciences (though I will gladly admit that a small part of gender studies is worth the title, unfortunately it has largely been occupied by ideologists).

Knowing at least some basics about group dynamics, cognitive bias and such things can be very useful to avoid unnecessary conflict within a group, for example. When you're barely surviving, turning your potentially random group into a functioning team is about the most important knowledge you can have.

Re:interesting, questionable

[strikethree]

Finally, it lacks a section of advanced technology.

http://www.phy.davidson.edu/in...

I HIGHLY recommend these.

This is not it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a collection of old books with expired copyright within a given subject. It is definitely not a manual I would like to read while running from zombies or trying to find shelter from the toxic falldown. Not that I could, because if I could find an epub capeable device, I would have access to a working powergrid, and the world wouldn't be that bad after all.

However, the idea is actually quite good. I reckon you could condense a survival book into one, quite big, leather bound book. Such a book would be in libraries or you could buy it just because it would be a cool looking book.

Re:This is not it

[Anonymous Coward]

So you didn't even go to the site to check it out? Because if you had, you would have noticed that the books in question are all about rebuilding civilization AFTER the zombies and toxic fallout have been dealt with and no longer exist.

survival?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I think if you can garden, know how to can foods, Understand how to preserve meat, have a good understanding of what a root cellar actually does, have knowledge on how to actually catch, skin and clean food - you'd find the preceding article quite amusing.

Think about it. We're worrying here on how to quickly pass on survival information to start from scratch while totally ignoring the fact that there is shit tons of ready made knives, metal to sharpen, museums full of ready to work stuff and more to keep from actually having to wait a hundred years to reboot.

Re:survival?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it. We're worrying here on how to quickly pass on survival information to start from scratch while totally ignoring the fact that there is shit tons of ready made knives, metal to sharpen, museums full of ready to work stuff and more to keep from actually having to wait a hundred years to reboot.

We are reasonably safe and ready to reboot unless there is a mass extinction event. And if there is, then there's not much that our knowledge of an previous, richer world can help us with. So, failure is always an option.

Re:survival?

[Sique]

Maybe you know how to can food, if you have cans and food available. But do you know how to get the metal in exactly the right tin form to make cans in the first place? Do you know which types of tin you can use for food and which ones to avoid? How do you deal with the corrosion of iron, with poisonous ions from copper, lead and zinc?

Re:survival?

[eam]

When everyone else is running through the stores looting all the twinkies, he'll head over to the section where the mason jars are stacked. It's not like he'll need that many: when you empty one, you wash it and use it again.

Re:survival?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Shows how much you know. Home canning is done with glass jars.

Re:survival?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "canning" but most people do it with jars. The tops of the jars are metal, but previously, people used wax to seal the jar. You boil the jars, put in whatever you're "canning", while it's still hot, then pour the liquid wax on top. The wax sets up and you have a nice seal. The only thing you need metal for is the pot to heat things in.

Re:survival?

[DerekLyons]

he'll head over to the section where the mason jars are stacked. It's not like he'll need that many: when you empty one, you wash it and use it again.

You've never actually canned have you? The short term problem with mason jars isn't the ability to wash the jar - it's being able to replace the seals, which are one use. (And even if the plastic seals weren't one use, the metal lids will still corrode and fail before too long.) Then there's the seal on your pressure canner (vitally important if you're going to can meat) - it too will only last a few years at most.

Canning food is the practice of a technological society. It's unsustainable without considerable industrial infrastructure.

Re:survival?

[Anonymous Coward]

God, I wish ACs had mod points.

I tell people about the pickles my Grandma made. They look astounded that pickles can be made, apparently in the consumer universe, they can only be bought.

Re:survival?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

You sir, are an idiot. You have no clue what you are talking abot, and willbe the first to go when civilization falls.

I now have a reason for cheering that to happen.

Obligatory Heinlein

[itsme1234]

"FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD: TRADING POST & RESTAURANT BAR

American Vodka, Corn Liquor, Applejack, Pure Spring Water, Grade "A" Milk, Corned Beef & Potatoes, Steak & Fried Potatoes, Butter & some days Bread, Smoked Bear Meat, Jerked Quisling (by the neck), Crepes Suzettes to order. !!!

Any BOOK Accepted as Cash!!!!
DAY NURSERY !!
FREE KITTENS!!
Blacksmithing, Machine Shop, Sheet Metal Work-You Supply the Metal.
FARNHAM SCHOOL OF CONTRACT BRIDGE Lessons by Arrangement. Social Evening Every Wednesday.

WARNING!!!

Ring bell. Wait. Advance with your Hands Up. Stay on path, avoid mines. We lost three customers last week. We can't afford to lose YOU.

No sales tax.

â"Hugh & Barbara Farnham & Family, Freeholders"

Re:Obligatory Heinlein

[Anonymous Coward]

No lawyers and politicians, no money worries, at least in the beginning? Sounds good to me. Sign me up! I've read Stephen King's "The Stand", survivors would get by by scavenging stores, homes etc. Priority would be to get power generation up and running. The stored knowledge of the internet should be preserved for offline reference. Nuke Las Vegas and enjoy the brave new world!

Re:Obligatory Heinlein

[meta-monkey]

You can actually download the entirety of Wikipedia. It's about 10GB compressed so you can easily fit it on a USB key. So just saying, if you can get power for a laptop, you've got a good start.

Christmas!?!?!?

[itsme1234]

WTF, 100-200 titles on f* Christmas!?!?!??

Including "A Christmas Carol-Charles Dickens-Audio (mp3)" ?

That would help for sure... and somebody complained about pdf's...

Re:Christmas!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

to top it off, it's likely a religion-fueled war that gets us into a post-apocalyptic state in the first place.

Re:Christmas!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not on mp3s, but I think if you want to restart civilization you'd want to preserve literature too - Project Gutenberg ftw!

Re:Christmas!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't value society and it's culture, then it's hardly surprising you don't value passing it on to the next generation.
Some would argue that's the whole point of our existence - to carry on and leave things a little better then we found them.

This idea could be a good match for OLPC

[Anonymous Coward]

This idea could be a good match for OLPC.

What I might consider "survival knowledge", a subsistence farmer might see as "useful methods to improve crop yields".

Re:This idea could be a good match for OLPC

[slashdot_commentator]

Don't think so. The torrent indicated it was 110 Gb in size.

Re:This idea could be a good match for OLPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, text-only Wikipedia would fit on a blank DVD. Stripping all but the essential pictures from these files would probably result in a sub 1GB size file.

Wishful thinking

[Required Snark]

There's a big problem with raw materials. All the resources that are easy to get are gone. No more near surface iron, copper, zinc, tin, lead, etc. No forests of tall hardwoods to cut down. No coal that isn't deep under mountains.

Then there is land fertility and changing climate. And where do you get seeds that are not adapted to modern agriculture practice? What farm animal breeds will be available? Also, there is a lot less game to hunt, so there goes that source of protein.

Even if you bootstrap to 1900 or so, the mineral problem is not going to get any easier.

You can only scavenge for so long. What then?

So the whole project has a whiff of impractical thinking. The libertarian/Randian showing that all it takes is individual initiative without that pesky government screwing everything up.

No Junior Woodchucks Guidebook is going to save civilization.

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Better tell all the strip miners in Wyoming there's no more coal left near the surface.

Better tell those sequoias they don't exist.

Isn't all that metal near the surface, in landfills?

There's more deer now in Pennsylvania than when it was first visited by Europeans. They thrive on cornfields interspersed between game lands.

Keep in mind, the library projects that within a few months of civilization collapse, up to 90% of the human population will be dead. You won't need to rebuild a civilization to support more than a billion people worldwide, at least at first, and it will start off in small pockets of probably not more than a million.

Re:Wishful thinking

[will_die]

There are plenty of old mines load with raw materials that are easy to get to. The reason no one currently cares about them is that the amount of money and time it would take to extract can be invested into places that would yield a higher return.
Switch the situation around and if you are back to hand tools and older style explosives and those mines are of use again.
Looking at current problems with wild boars and deer, hunting would not be a problem, it might harder for the first couple of years (there goes the canned goods that you can find) but after that you would probably be killing just to protect your farming.

Re:Wishful thinking

[ledow]

It all depends on scale. If you're expecting us to be up and running with a populous of 7bn within a year, maybe you're right.

But if there's only 100,000 left, spread out over the globe, with the rich pickings of a former civilisation to kickstart from, then we don't actually need a lot of raw materials as you suggest.

You know what you'd need long before coal, iron, copper, zinc? Food. And though the initial pickings may be easy, before long you'll turn any old bit of scrap into a plough (not plow, fecking Americans) so you can ensure some future longevity.

It's this stuff we're talking about - getting from "damn, the food has run out and scavenging is useless" to "comfortable farm life" for those with some foresight and backbone.

Natural wood isn't hard to come by, even in cities like London. It has one of the country's oldest forests. Coal isn't a necessary - we did without it for many millennia. Land fertility will always be an issue but only if you want to intensively farm like we do today, to feed the entire countries from a handful of fields. For personal and small community use, even a carrot the size of a pencil is viable if you work at it (and they used to be exactly that size). And humans have dealt with changing climate for millions of years - we came through the last ice age with nothing but a flint axe and an animal skin.

Seeds, also, happen to grow naturally. We just don't collect them. And they aren't viable in intensive modern farming but there's absolutely nothing wrong with them for the uses we need them for. Farm animals are the same - we wouldn't have the huge, bloated cows. But you know what? My girlfriend's family keep two miniature goats, and she's looking at doing the same in our little suburban house in London. Grass and scrap food to milk (butter, cheese, yoghurt), meat and as many other goats as you can keep. There's a reason that the desert tribes have goats, even in the damn desert where there is no grass.

Minerals are the last thing to worry about. Sure, they make the return to full civilisation easier but, by then, you're looking at a collective of hundreds of thousands who are self-sustaining before they go" Right, we should open up a mine". And, to be honest, even today in some countries some people live their entire lives with nothing more than a bit of scrap metal to live under and an old T-shirt.

It's not a waste of time. But to see that, you have to have some concept of survival priorities. Worry about your food first. By the time you're cursing the lack of zinc, you won't have much else to worry about anyway.

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

"All the resources that are easy to get are gone. No more near surface iron, copper, zinc, tin, lead, etc."

My god! Have we been tossing them into a black hole? Or all they all still here in our cars, planes, trains, boats, houses, tools, etc?

The future will simply plunder the past, as it always has.

You want iron? Well, see that abandoned city there? Someone took all the cars already, but if you just use the same mining tools as before, you can strip apart those skyscrapers they used to build back when energy was cheap and electricity ran the HVAC and elevators!

Re:Wishful thinking

[dcw3]

Why wouldn't the livestock supplies still at least be proportional to the surviving population? You seem to be making a lot of assumptions with nothing to back them up.

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

"a populous"? A populous what?

Re:Wishful thinking

[itzly]

One thing you'd need to worry about is phosphate to grow the food. Unlike metals like copper that you can get by salvaging old pipes and wires, the phosphate will readily dissolve in water and wash to the ocean. Of course, you can still grow food without phosphate fertilizer, but the yield will be a lot lower.

Re:Wishful thinking

[operagost]

Because a dictator is going to fix all of those problems?

Re:Wishful thinking

[u38cg]

You must be careful when slagging Americanisms. Many simply reflect the original usage. Plough is Old English - ploh - and 'plow' was equally common until the 18th century.

Re:Wishful thinking

[operagost]

It used to be spelled "plouh" 900 years ago, so you're "wrong" too.

Re:Wishful thinking

[tibit]

That's not entirely true. There's lots of such resources that are left alone mainly due to reasons of environmental or urban protection. Colorado would enjoy its boom heyday again if we were to go back to "horse-and-buggy economy".

Re:Wishful thinking

[sls1j]

There's a big problem with raw materials. All the resources that are easy to get are gone. No more near surface iron, copper, zinc, tin, lead, etc.

Try the local land fill.

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

"There's a big problem with raw materials. All the resources that are easy to get are gone. No more near surface iron, copper, zinc, tin, lead, etc. No forests of tall hardwoods to cut down. No coal that isn't deep under mountains.
Then there is land fertility and changing climate. And where do you get seeds that are not adapted to modern agriculture practice? What farm animal breeds will be available? Also, there is a lot less game to hunt, so there goes that source of protein."

Just wait a million years or so for the crust to churn everything up to the surface again, the climate to settle down again, and for Darwin to sort things out again. No problem! No worries! Money back guarantee!

Re:Wishful thinking

[bluegutang]

There are plenty of raw materials left. They are concentrated in deposits commonly known as "landfills".

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you worry about your food, worry about water. People tend to dehydrate or get water born illnesses way before they starve.

Re:Wishful thinking

[Tagged_84]

Clearly you haven't heard of Australia, the largest exporter of iron ore and coal and a government fighting to remove world heritage protection of some of the oldest forests left as well as trying to destroy a world wonder for more coal exports. Abundant raw resources are our greatest burden!

The Encyclopedists

[Anonymous Coward]

An Encyclopedia Galactica for Earth isn't such a bad idea.

Re:The Encyclopedists

[Holi]

Or something like it, it could have, in large friendly print, the words "Don't Panic" on the cover.

Foxfire Books

[coaxial]

Foxfire has been doing this the mid 1960s. How to raise and slaughter animals. How to grow crops. How to bootstrap iron working, including gunsmithing. Everything you need, and with all the mammy-pamby crap from "urban homesteaders" and preppers. Practical knowledge from people that were doing it daily.

Re:Foxfire Books

[NormalVisual]

+1 for the Foxfire series. I have a pretty fair number of the books myself.

Re:Foxfire Books

[tehcyder]

Foxfire has been doing this the mid 1960s. How to raise and slaughter animals. How to grow crops. How to bootstrap iron working, including gunsmithing. Everything you need, and with all the mammy-pamby crap from "urban homesteaders" and preppers. Practical knowledge from people that were doing it daily.

Hope they've got one on a quick, painless way to kill yourself. I wouldn't want to live like that for the rest of my life.

Re:Foxfire Books

[DerekLyons]

Foxfire has been doing this the mid 1960s. How to raise and slaughter animals. How to grow crops. How to bootstrap iron working, including gunsmithing. Everything you need, and with all the mammy-pamby crap from "urban homesteaders" and preppers. Practical knowledge from people that were doing it daily.

I find that people who worship the Foxfire books haven't actually read them or comprehended the contents - because virtually everything they describe depends on some level on the existence of a significant technological society to exist on the margins of. The people of Appalachia, while dirt poor, were not isolated.

Re:Foxfire Books

[coaxial]

True, but it's unlikely that even after The Great Cataclysm(tm), that you'll ever have to build everything from scratch again. There's instruction manuals.

Why not get Wikipedia?

[Whiternoise]

If you're downloding ~100GB of files that you can only read using a computer, it makes sense to grab a dump of Wikipedia (10GB compressed). It's public domain and has lots of (varying) quality information on a wide variety of topics. If you want images that'll run you around 0.5TB, but hey it's a fairly complete representation of humanity.

Could you survive on Wikipedia alone? Probably not, but it would really really help if you wanted cross-referenced information quickly.

Another point, no sarcasm, I'd trust Wikipedia for medical information slightly more than a 1900s era textbook.

You may also want to check out CD3WD

[slashdot_commentator]

It's an effort headed by an aid worker in Africa (Alex Weir). Basically, he wanted to produce a compendium of useful information which could be applied by developing nations; topics like agriculture, engineering, construction, sanitation, medicine, etc. . Much of the source material comes from UN publications, so its more current and applicable than "turn of the century" techniques. Among the interesting items, it includes an html, hypertext expert system for medical diagnostics. You go to the start page, click relevant symptoms, and eventually it leads you to a guestimate of what's ailing you. Its not remotely as competent as an actual doctor, but its better than nothing when you're stuck "in the Bush".

Besides the information being indexed and organized, Weir had a vision of burning the collection on DVDs and distributing them to the third world. (At one point, it appeared he was reorganizing the material as pdf pages which could be viewed by a DVD player, using DVD menus. That would remove the need for a conventional computer or tablet to access the material. I don't know if it ever got finished.) About a year or two ago, he decided to reorganize the collection in a hybrid wiki form, which he calls "microdownloads". Its now updated more frequently, and the DVD collection will probably not be revised.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Facebook page hasn't been updated since 4/11/14, and Google has a link hinting that the site was "hacked". Finally, going to the website pops up a login window. I'm not sure if that's a new development in response to the hacking, or that the hacker still "controls" the site. Perhaps Mr. Weir is still in Africa and can't address the situation until he's returned to civilization. Its pretty unusable in its current state, but there's probably a way to find a previous working mirror of the site.

In any case, I'll leave links for people who wish to investigate the issue further, and more important, a magnet link to pickup the 2012 cd3wd 6 DVD collection by torrent.

facebook

cd3wd site

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7AEE811F0E802B29C1F2E4C785CE866F94AA2084&dn=cd3wd%202012%206%20dvds&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ccc.de%3a80&tr=http%3a%2f%2f64.244.102.71%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.istole.it%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.publicbt.com%3a80%2fannounce

Re:You may also want to check out CD3WD

[roger_that]

I found that you can still get to the files, after closing the Username/password dialog box. I went as far as hitting a download link (http://cd3wd.com/mdownloads/100352_wfs_/100352_wfs_.7z.2794.zip), and a dialog box asked what to do with the file (Windows dialog box, not from the website). I didn't actually save the file on the thin client that I am working from, but it looks like it should work.

A manual of homoeopathic veterinary practice 1873!

[citizenr]

Its not meant to be practical and useful in any way shape or form. Its just a hobby, like prepping or embroidery.
This collection of books is meant to make you feel good when you go to sleep, and dream of going back in time with your ipad.

Imagine whipping out that bad boy in middle ages to ... oh wait, you just got burned at the stake, lets try again.
Imagine whipping out that bad boy after zombie apocalypse, you can read about fur trapping ... or you could just break window glass, enter Hugo Boss shop and take any leather jacked you want.

The big problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The survival library mentions 3 of the big 5: food, shelter, defense, power, trade. Post-apocalyptic movies rarely show how cities are maintained. It takes a lot of resources to keep one operating.

Food and water is the first problem in a apocalypse because very little of these are stored in big cities. After the scrabble for remaining supplies, then robbing the weak of their supplies, the next step is a massive exodus from the cities into arable regions of the country.

Shelter is a mixed bag: On the one hand, shelter already exists: No electricity means skyscrapers and high-rise buildings will not have working plumbing. Plus ingress and egress more than a few floors above ground will not be practical. Suburbia will become a battleground as people leaving the cities fight for ground-level housing. It will be necessary to preserve arable land for farming, not housing the exodus from the cities.

Power is the one thing people can't get their head around. There aren't a lot of horses so no, we won't regress to the 1700s, more like the 1100s but better educated. As mentioned in this thread, mains power and battery power will end quickly after a disaster. So the options will be to grow alternative fuels, or convert electric motors into combustion-driven/wind-driven/water-driven generators. This will have the advantage of restoring our electricity-based technology.

It's difficult to predict defense: Humans have fought one another for centuries over land-locked resources. After an apocalypse, once the low-hanging fruit is collected, people will band together for both defense and hunting.

Trade includes transport, since building bigger things requires resources that aren't local: Stone, wood, metal, salt and fertile soil won't exist on every river bank.

arse

[Hognoxious]

The phrase you're looking for is treasure trove.

Long Now does it better

[Jesrad]

The Long Now Foundation has been covering this issue pretty well, too, with its 'Manual for Civilisation project'. They actually built a place with airtight shelves and started stockpiling actual books, which beats piling PDF files in a webserver anyday in long-term storage and techno-breakup resilience. They even store spores and seeds of all kinds of useful plants, and have a project for preserving animal DNA & eggs too.

Canning != Cans

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, "know how to can food" means that you know how to cook the food and heat the glass jars and prepare the lids and seals so that it doesn't go bad without being refrigerated, not that you know how to make industrial metal cans. The real question is where you're going to get the glass jars and the metal lids and especially the little rubber rings that go around the edge of the inner lid to make the seal. You can still buy canning jars at the supermarket, but there aren't nearly enough of them to support even a few families, and the large pots you need to cook everything in are obsolete at everything except culinary specialty shops.

Re:Canning != Cans

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevermind with the obliteration of heirloom plants and the rise of big agriculture, who can garden for more than one season anymore? All the plants are sterile.

He also mentions preserving meat, catching it, skinning it, and getting the meat from it, but fails entirely to notice that all meat bearing animals would be gone in less than a few months without the Leviathon of law stopping people from over hunting.

He is what is called a "suburban survivalist", someone that has a specific time and place and anywhere else would fail.

Re:Canning != Cans

[Anonymous Coward]

lol you guys a f*cking crazy. heirloom plants are everywhere. I have hundreds of types of seeds. its trivial to trap rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, any rodent for a permanent supply of meat.

Re:Canning != Cans

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is where you're going to get the glass jars and the metal lids and especially the little rubber rings that go around the edge of the inner lid to make the seal.

Glass can be recycled or resynthesized from sand. Skip the modern lids/rings, use paraffin wax like great-grandma did. Because paraffin isn't going to be in great supply without oil refining infrastructure, use beeswax instead. Melt beeswax, pour molten beeswax over liquid.

Re:Canning != Cans

[qpqp]

"Tastes like rat."

Re:Canning != Cans

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I have over 100 mason jars stored in the attic - and someone else mentioned beeswax for the lids.

Been canning foods at home for over 20 years - I routinely feel sorry for people who've only had tomatoes out of a can.

I have more available too - it's the advantage you get when you grow up in a poor immigrant family and learn not only where your food comes from, but the ways to insure growing it and preserving it.

All you naysayers to what I posted? I gave 10 lbs of Prague Powder . Did you know what that was before looking it up?

Encylopedia Brittanica (on Paper)

[lxrslh]

This will be the "bible" for restoring civilization in the future.

It's a usefull book of Eli

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more useful and valuable than a bible!!
BNZ

A plow for a geek?

[damn_registrars]

A plow is important if you need to either produce food for many people, or if you plan on producing enough food to sell to others. If you are living alone you can likely subsist on a much smaller garden that would not necessitate a plow.

Re:A plow for a geek?

[Red4man]

And how would you know this, belt sander boy?

Not the politics we *had*...

[danaris]

Maybe something like this?

Chapter 19 - Politics How we did it back then was we gathered up in entities we called "countries". Each country spent a sizable percent of its population's income to build weapons. The strongest countries built so called weapons of mass destruction. Those are the reason you are reading this. End of chapter. 19.

So what you're saying is, you strongly support a significant amount describing what not to do?

Nobody said the chapter on politics had to describe what we had in slavish detail. It should, in fact, explain what would be best based on our current understanding, which should, for example, include explanations of some voting systems that are significantly less prone to devolve into a two-party system with strong incumbent advantage than single-preference, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all like we have now.

Dan Aris

Re:Not the politics we *had*...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is, you strongly support a significant amount describing what not to do?

Yes, absolutely, and not merely for politics! As a software contractor, my day-to-day is almost always maintaining a bunch of existing code written by an indeterminate number of prior developers who are long gone. The rare occasions when there is a comment describing why something wasn't implemented in some way have been invaluable.

So, yes. All the ways not to store water. All the ways not to fertilize fields. All the ways not to cut stone. All the ways not to forge metals. And all the rationale behind all of that. All that matters as much as all the ways to do things.

- T

Malthus told us so

[tomhath]

Apparently one of the books in your library is An Essay on the Principle of Population. Somehow people manage to come up with alternatives to starvation.

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[Anonymous Coward]

Love it! Great TZ ref

100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Or print them at home in pocket format.

All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

How to build a plow... how to grow wheat... how to build a house... blacksmith...

I have texts older than Jesus that tell me how to turn regular people into geniuses. I have access to information I intend to use to fix the school systems by improving the learning process at the level of base theory. I have looked at fast mental math and mathematics teaching curricula which provide people an automatic mental math skill. I've studied philosophy and project management, both with large usefulness and implications in all contexts.

Your world won't get far if you don't understand how to produce governments, what imperatives govern societies--not "thou shalt not steal" and "child pornography is bad", but what makes these things wrong, and why does it fall to society to enforce these things and not to enforce "don't fuck your neighbor's wife"? You won't get very far without people who can learn efficiently, who can compute the mathematics behind engineering largely in their head and on paper, and who can take large initiatives and turn them into well-executed plans. You can't derive or rediscover technology without a firm grasp of the scientific process.

Two thousand years got us here from nailing a carpenter to a tree. Civilization existed for thousands of years prior to that. The Egyptians and Chinese had beer and oil 6000 years ago. The modern era came so unfathomably slow that our calendar is based on less than a third of human history--some estimates put civilized society's beginnings as far back as 13,000 years.

They had plows and oil 6000 years ago.

Re:All hard skills?

[meta-monkey]

I've always been interested in math history, and when I was a kid always wondered how the hell people calculated things like cube roots before calculators. I was so excited in calculus when I learned linear approximation or the Newton-Raphson method. But even then you couldn't really do any of that until the invention of calculus. Did nobody before Newton and Liebniz know how to find a cube root (that wasn't obvious)?

Re:All hard skills?

[u38cg]

Rubbish. You can derive modern technology from scratch in a few hundred years: all you need is a society that can support thinkers, printing to distribute ideas, and free trade to generate the wealth to make it happen.

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

You have to memorize all the perfect squares and perfect cubes of single-digit numbers. After that, you can find either.

Given that I know the decimal place is arbitrary (thanks to the soroban) and that the method follows a pattern (x^(1/n) find the largest perfect nth root of n digits), I can generalize this in many ways. By memorizing 8 numbers--the perfect exponents of 2 through 9--and operating on sets of n digits, you can compute the nth root of any number. For 4, it would be 4 digits, and all perfect 4th exponents.

For anyone who hasn't put in the effort to perform mental math of third, forth, and fifth roots, it is trivial to use mental multiplication or lattice calculation (Napir's Bones) to quickly write up 0^4 = 0, 1^4 = 1, 2^4 = 16, 3^4 = 81, and so on. With this short list, one may then inscribe upon paper the number, the 4th root operation, and then begin with 4 digits and follow the same algorithm as with the third and second roots. Thus if you really do require the exact fifth root of a number out to 17 decimal places, you can find it with a few seconds of computation and a sheet of papyrus or a stick and some sand.

The ancients did not have the PAO system or even the Mnemonic Major system for which to chunk and retain numbers. Had they, they would have likely used them for scratch pad in mental math, along with a mind palace to compose fifteen or more computation registers of six digits each. Mental math is computed rapidly by using a great number of systems which have been always known to those of any intelligence, and are frequently rediscovered by small children.

The chief mental math system in use today is the Friendly Numbers system. As a child, I would approach problems such as 13 + 22 by first adding the 3 and 2 to get 10 + 25. When given problems such as 13 + 22 + 17 + 19 + 35, I would then see 3 + 7 and 9 + 1, changing 13 to 10 and 22 to 21 in respect, and leaving 10, 21, 20, 20, 35, and thus 10 + 20 + 20 + 30 + 20 and 5 + 1, or 106.

Another historical mental math system is that of the use of the Japanese Soroban, a 4/1 abacus. The Soroban leads the way into Anzan: while the methods of the Soroban dictate how to operate the beads, the beads only represent numerical transformations. The memorization of the complement of 7 and 3 on 10 means that 25 + 37 is equivalent to 25 - 3 + 30 + 10. Thus the first step is to add 2 + 3 to gain 50, and then to add 7 + 5, and instead provide 60 and 5 - 3, which is 2. 62. It is also memorized that 3 and 2 are complements on 5, because the Soroban toggles the 5 bead and then provides the appropriate complement (rather than 5 + 0, it becomes 0 + 2); this is less obvious when dealing with straight decimal.

In short: a person calculating via Anzan--mentally, without manipulating a Soroban--would produce 50, then produce 60 and 2, calculating from left to right. In American schools, addition is by the carry system, in which it is taught by rote: 7 + 5 is the matter of counting 5 more from 7, which is why you see many people COUNT ON THEIR FINGERS WHEN THEY ADD, and you produce 2-carry-1. The same is followed for 2 + 3, plus the carried 1. This is many more operations, and the obvious friendly number systems come about as people memorize multiples of two: 7 + 5 becomes 6 + 6 which is 12; 2 + 3 + 1 becomes 3 + 3 which is 6. Anzan takes this a step further, computing each pair of digit additions by singular atomic computation rather than iterative loops and simplifying operations.

Soroban and Anzan multiplication come down to addition, through route of memorizing all products from 1x1 to 9x9 and performing the multiplication left-to-right and adding into an accumulator. One common method is strikingly similar to lattice multiplication, which tends to require n*m or 2(n*m) single-digit multiplication operations, plus 2(n*m)-1 additions. Mentally, if you recognize all mul

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes and what skills do you suppose are required to support thinkers?

Re:All hard skills?

[u38cg]

Actually, scratch that. Free trade and printing are all you need. People will work the rest out quite quickly.

Re:All hard skills?

[meta-monkey]

That was fascinating, thank you. To quickly find cube roots I would generally employ linear approximation and get close enough.

(29)^1/3

f(x) = x^1/3
f '(x) = (1/3)x^-2/3
27 ~= 29
f(29) ~= f(27) + 2f '(27)
= 3 + 2*(1/3)(1/3^2) = 3 + 2/27 ~= 3.074
since 29^(1/3) ~= 3.072, that's not bad for a quick and dirty.

What are your thoughts on the new Common Core math teaching system that's been adopted by most US states?

Note, if you go looking for information on it, look at the source materials from the creators. The specification only provides the concepts and the curriculum but not the course materials. Professionally produced course materials are still being created, so some teachers have created their own materials, some of which are terrible. The worst of these are then scanned and put on the Internet as if they're representative of the entire program, inciting conservatives who (falsely) believe the system is imposed by the federal government.

From what I've seen, the curriculum calls for teaching methods like what you describe (and which is generally the way I do math in my head). One blog I saw was incensed because when solving 7 + 7, instead of just memorizing '14' they wanted the students to break that down into 7 + 3 + 4, recognize 7 + 3 as a group of ten, then add 4. That to me provides for a deeper understanding and would eventually make working in other bases much easier. The only reason the second place in our numbering system represents a group of ten is because we have ten fingers. If they understand grouping it would be much easier to switch to say hexadecimal by counting groups of 16. C + 9 = (C + 4) + 5 = 15.

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm looking around at the world today thinking, "Yeah, people have forgotten how to work the rest out."

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

One blog I saw was incensed because when solving 7 + 7, instead of just memorizing '14' they wanted the students to break that down into 7 + 3 + 4, recognize 7 + 3 as a group of ten, then add 4.

That's the Friendly Numbers system. You're discarding the consideration that people tend to memorize doubles anyway, hence why they'll gravitate towards 5s (can you count by five? How many consecutive multiples of three can you spout off without pausing?) or doubles. Halving things is a useful skill, and also a common operation when dealing with fractional arithmetic, and so doubles become Friendly Numbers. This is why people don't memorize 6+7 as 13, unless they've played a lot of Tut's Tomb.

Soroban system memorizes the following for Addition and Subtraction: on 5, {(1,4),(2,3)}; on 10, {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6),(5,5)}. 5 and 5 on 10 is meaningful enough to optimize out: it's right in the middle, half, and isometric. The others are meaningful and derivable, so can be computed as needed when they're not wholly memorized. Knowing the (2,8) complement and the (3,2) complement helps when playing Tut's Tomb, as you see 5 and 8 and immediately recognize 10+3 (again, we've rediscovered the Friendly Numbers system).

That to me provides for a deeper understanding and would eventually make working in other bases much easier.

No, it won't. You have to stretch to number theory and explain the extremely abstract concept of base 10 being 0-9, then 9+1 overflows to 0, producing 1 digit in the next left column. The Soroban does part of this implicitly: the decimal place is wholly irrelevant, and the math is isometric regardless of where you place the decimal. Without an explicit and complicated explanation of overflow (it's only easy to grasp because I understand the concept already), it's hard to grasp that a 0-7 system would have 7+1 = 10: 10 looks like binary 10, and so the obvious association is made, and it's read as 12b7.

To implement effective mental arithmetic on hex, octal, and so on, you'd need a new set of complements; such memorization can't be made any easier by any teaching method, as it's already fully simplified. For hex, the center is 8 (half of 16), giving on 8 {(1,7),(2,6),(3,5),(4,4)} and on 16 {(1,15),(2,14),(3,13),(4,12),(5,11),(6,10),(7,9),(8,8)}. The procedures would otherwise be the same, although you'd need to memorize an expanded multiplication table up through 0-f x 0-f for multiplication and division.

The arithmetic prowess of the average Japanese third grader is so great that American media sensationalizes "Flash Anzan" (just Anzan, in Japan) as some kind of magical wonder in which tiny, gifted children perform as human calculators. It's nothing spectacular; it's actually pretty boring. Being aware of how the Japanese perform at math and how well they understand concepts as outlined above, my position on the Common Criteria is that it is a pile of "something must be done; this is something" created by confused politicians who did not put in enough research and decided they must invent something unilaterally from their own malformed education. Rather than structuring and optimizing, they have made much of the curriculum more complicated and slower.

It's notable that serious educators consider memorization a bad thing. Historically, we operated via faculty education: that flexing the brain, like a muscle, would make it stronger. This is wholly false: the brain is not a muscle, and exercising individual mental faculties does not improve them. The study of language does not make the brain stronger at learning language, and the study of math or the drilling of memory does not make the brain better at memorization. These are facts.

Based on the above facts, John Dewey lead a progressive education renaissance to throw out all faculty education and encourage student-focused, experience-based curriculum. Gone are the days of Latin and Greek, of multiplication tables, of rote memo

Re:All hard skills?

[u38cg]

They managed it when they had no idea. Coming up with the ideas is the smallest of the problems; it's getting people educated and getting ideas transmitted through time and space. Free trade solves the first and printing the second.

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, we see how free trade has solved education in America.

Our education system has tumbled down to the bottom of what a civilized education system can be. It is practically an indoctrination system. It doesn't teach people how to think; it just shoves things on kids, in hopes of keeping them busy.

It appears to produce people like you.

Re:All hard skills?

[u38cg]

(1) I'm not a product of the US American education system (thank goodness) (2) the US American system is light years away from being a free market at any level (3) a universal basic literacy program is not what I suggest is required, at least initially.

Re:All hard skills?

[bluefoxlucid]

Well then, let me enlighten you about the United States education system. Sit back and enjoy a bit of history.

Back in the early 20th century, it was discovered that faculty education theory does not hold. This is to say: the brain is not a muscle. Faculty education purports to strengthen the brain by flexing, such that repeated memory drilling makes memory work better, and the learning of Latin and Greek make the mind's ability to process language sharper and firmer. Such things are a complete falsehood.

As reaction, John Dewey lead a progressive education renaissance, replacing this with a sort of student-centric education by experience. Rather than studying from biology textbooks, memorizing times tables, and reciting historical events, students would grow plants from seed, perform mathematics from word problems, and read historical stories and enact plays and games. This would replace "I know" with "I have experienced", creating a life of experiences as education.

There are obvious faults in this. From an unstructured and unknowledgeable view, one could easily comment on Latin and Greek providing the basis of English and other European languages, thus providing strength in English. This argument is fluffy and makes no notable contribution; it is, however, correct for other reasons, which I shall expand upon.

To start with, the ideals of John Dewey imply that "experience" is all-important and, directly and explicitly, damn the concept of "memorization". According to this new progressive education method, memorization is wrong, is toxic, and is damaging. Memorization is painful, difficult, detracting, and dull; it distracts the student from the pleasure and enjoyment of learning by his experiences, and provides no real benefit. This view is patently false.

All learning, all knowledge, predicates on memory. A person cannot learn what he cannot remember. Experience forms a type of memory, and forms it more strongly than rote drilling. I will agree that the rote memorization of facts is dull and toxic; but this is not the only form of memorization, and it is not reason to eschew memorization entire as a damaging or even an unimportant aspect of education.

What faculty learning misinterpreted--and what its detractors completely missed--was the improvement of the mind by *technique*. Memory, for example, improves by mnemonics such as acrostics, the method of Loci, rhymes, and visualization. The learning of Latin and Greek provides a familiar base on which to derive English and other European languages, easing the learning and use of such, at least in terms of vocabulary. These are not matters of the brain getting stronger, but rather of it having knowledge of ways to approach these things more effectively--in the same way that a crowbar does not make you stronger, but it does allow you to rip the side of a house clean off.

The many skills we need for a strong education system include mnemonics, study systems, mental mathematics, problem analysis systems, decision making systems, and the like. I will expand on each in brief here; I will trade a strong and complete argument for brevity and structure.

Mnemonics form the foundation: what is not remembered cannot be known, and what is not known cannot be learned. Mnemonics allow for quick, efficient memory of things, at least temporarily, so that they may be recalled in the course of learning or applying without carrying a reference. Such recall allows learning and doing to apply freshly-introduced concepts which may otherwise be promptly forgotten, which allows for understanding of further explanation, and thus allows for more solid learning. These techniques thus increase learning and thinking efficiency.

Study systems closely relate to mnemonics. SQ3R and SQW3R propose a method for examining new material (largely, written material) and preparing to meet it in learning. The general mode of these and other study systems is to Survey the headings, pictures, introductory sentences

Fixing the wrong problems

[petes_PoV]

All the technical solutions will either remain known or are easily re-discovered. There are two big problems with rebooting society:

First, you need LOTS of people. Most of the stuff we have today relies on a certain minimum population density. That is especially true of transportation systems and without them, it would not be possible to move the raw materials around. So medical knowledge and knowing how to keep young children from dying will be paramount.

The second problem will be producing an effective counter-argument to all the superstitions, ignorance and religions that are bound to appear if "civilisation" dies off. That is what held back our scientific and technological development: From Aristotle to the Industrial Revolution there was 2,000 years of very little progress and what there was, was usually achieved DESPITE religion, not with its encouragement.

The technology will come of its own accord, but speeding it up will need manual for social survival, not designs for steam engines

Re:Fixing the wrong problems

[meta-monkey]

The second problem will be producing an effective counter-argument to all the superstitions, ignorance and religions that are bound to appear if "civilisation" dies off.

That's why you've got to get there first. We already know the playbook.

"The LORD thy GOD commands that thou shalt study integral calculus! Also, the High Mathematicians get all the hot chicks. GOD COMMANDS IT!"

Oh goody, a Plow... let's rape the land, shall we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...

The plow is responsible for destroying more land in more countries than any other force. They should really look into farming practices that improve the land as you farm, they exist and have so for decades.

The fucking plow *facepalm*

The second library

[Koyaanisqatsi]

This is all nice and good, but someone ought to start working on the second, more secret library, to be located in the other end of the planet ...

Only psychology and psychohistory books allowed there ...

Re:The second library

[carnivore302]

I'll put our emperor on it!

won't work on Mars though

[Anonymous Coward]

Needs a chapter on keeping the oxygen in and the cosmic rays out, if it's going to be any use.

Print?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great initiative, but if this ever becomes necessary, I'm afraid it wouldn't be of any use on a hard drive. How big would it be to print? Is that even viable?

Foundation

[rherbert]

Why don't they just call it the Encyclopedia Galactica like Asimov?

Re:Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just call it the Encyclopedia Galactica like Asimov?

Or maybe they could call it The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[ccubedd]

My idea was to use micropheesh (spelling?) great way to compress large amounts of data and still readable with a makeshift projecter using a candle and a magnifying lense. Another advantage is that you can more easily hide this library from mauraders. another advantage is you could print information that is useful early on in larger font, and have information about advanced technology in smaller font (requiring) more sophistocated projectors anyway thats my idea, "share alike" ;)

My one issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as it's composed of stuff from the 1800's and 1900's how is it going to represent the advances we've made as a society in regards to respecting the rights of women, minorities, Indigenous peoples as well as the LGBTQA community? Sure survival is nice but what about all that social progress?

Much of what was written back then reflected the society they lived in. It was even more oppressive than it is now, and my fear is that if something drastic were to happen our progress in regards to our being a more accepting or even tolerant society will be lost.

Re:My one issue.

[TwoEyedJack]

I suspect all of that would be out the window. Looking at history, the only other civilizations that embraced such were the Greeks and the Romans in their decadent declines. Once the issue of basic survival is back at the forefront, societies don't indulge in non-productive activities.

What about music?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no section on music.

I've seen some books on how to tune pianos (without using an electronic tuner) that perhaps should be included. Maybe how to make and repair instruments.

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[Anonymous Coward]

[...]micropheesh (spelling?)[...]

Microfiche.

No survivors in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're in the UK then access to kickass torrents has been blocked thanks to the RIAA and BPI.

Re:No survivors in the UK

[TheRealHocusLocus]

If you're in the UK then access to kickass torrents has been blocked thanks to the RIAA and BPI.

(perhaps UK folk can use this alternate torcache link)
too bad you posted AC so you probably won't see this...

Read 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'

[Irate Engineer]

Read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz If our technology is the root cause for the apocalypse, the survivors may not want that technology anymore. If you have one of these Ipads/books, you better keep it out of sight for a while else the mob might get you.

Another project, archiving languages...

[jim_deane]

http://rosettaproject.org/

How about something more up to date

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through a few of the topics and all the books were ~100 year old. That may be acceptable for some subjects but how about modern books on the subject and rank them from basic to advanced? I feel the thinking of the site may be that century old technology is easy to understand but I disagree. Some of the theories that the technologies were based would be hard to grasp because they are wrong, think electricity, medicine, heck even morality. I would rather someone study basic modern medicine texts than advanced ones written ten decades ago. Great concept but needs more work.

Already done.

[pubwvj]

If you're willing to accept digital then this has already been done ad absurdum on tens of thousands of blogs and wikis.

If you're expecting digital to go the way of the dinosaur, good likelihood, then this has already been done ad absurdum in tens of thousands of books.

The key is maintaining accessibility which fundamentally comes down to being able to read. The knowledge has already been gathered many times over.

100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what a jackass thing to do. "Uh duh, lets put this on a hard drive because everyone will have macbooks when civ takes a crap"

This is silly!

[Anonymous Coward]

While the advent of agriculture could be said to have brought more predictability to everyday life, it did not improve the subjective quality of life. One can trace most of the ills of the world to the establishment of growing and storing crops. Petty tyrants, plague, forced labor, all a consequence of fixed-in-place food sources.

No steam engine needed for your plow

[Anonymous Coward]

In this gloomy, unlikely scenario, a steam engine to pull your plow is not needed. You only need a breeding population of these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse

Why bother...

[rgbatduke]

a) It's already done, and is called "wikipedia". The problem of accessing wikipedia after the solar flare in a few days wipes out human technological civilization is left as an exercise for the reader.

b) OK, so it's not really done, and is going to be even less done as paper books more or less disappear from the world and people stop learning how to read because their personal digital implant delivers content directly into your cortex in full sensory mode, all of which goes away when a nuclear war followed by a space alien invasion reduces humans to a marginal species living in abandoned mines and sewage tunnels and living on rats. Brevity is then the soul of wit. We need three things:

1) How to make and blow glass.
2) How to turn glass into lenses and lenses into microscopes and telescopes.

These two things are already sufficient. They extend human senses into the microscopic and macroscopic, otherwise hidden, Universe, and nothing but common sense and observation is required from that point on. However,

3) How to build a printing press.

is also good, provided that people can still read.

Oh, you want to rebuild civilization QUICKLY? Either we're restarting from a partial, not full, reboot (that is, we still have easy access to things like unburned oil and coal, iron, maybe a few undamaged nuclear power plants with the engineers to run them) or it's just not happening!

The problem, you see, is easy access to those resources. The more we deplete the Earth's crust of readily minable resources, the harder it is to reboot civilization on a collapse. We just don't have a lot of places where oil still comes oozing up to the surface of the Earth, for example, so why and how exactly are people going to go looking for it a kilometer or two down? How easy is it going to be to find any? Steel requires iron (still fairly plentiful, granted) and coal. Hmmm, easy coal isn't so easy any more. Easy copper, not so much. Easy aluminum? No such thing, needs massive amounts of electricity (although ore is still plentiful enough. Even making chemical reagents like sulphuric or nitric or hydrochloric acid (key to building nearly anything interesting) require sulphur, salt, electricity.

This is what is going to be tough. Bootstrapping directly from type 0 pre-civilization to type 2 civilization is going to be very difficult if we've depleted all of the easy pathways to 2 while we are type 1, even if we preserve usable copies of wikipedia, the CRC handbook, the library of congress science section, the entire proceedings of the IEEE, and a complete copy of all patents ever filed in the US patent office (and have people who can read them, and who have managed to learn calculus and build stuff). Hydroelectric power, maybe. Alcohol can drive simple motors. But going straight to nuclear or photovoltaics is going to be pretty much impossible, and going the coal/oil route we've followed the first time is going to be much, much harder.

The best thing, therefore, is to take care of the civilization we've got...

rgb

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[Stuntmonkey]

Remove the battery, and swap out any electrolytic capacitors for other types. I don't know how the liquid in an LCD panel would behave over a 100 year timescale, so just to be safe I'd use an OLED panel instead.

Some info should not be left out

[Anonymous Coward]

Specificaly why would you leave the modern info on x-rays out the information we had 100 years ago was more dangerous than helpfull man think about what the aspect of each item your putting in man youve got a good idea but im sure you can tell from the flood of critique that you have some flaws in this system to say the least just dont publish something that doesnt include modern saftey information on something like x-rays thats super dangerous what if half the people that were left after the fall of society fucked themselves up with x-rays man not good ya know.

Do you have that ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... in wax cylinder format?

Seed for video link.

[Anonymous Coward]

That video link is riddled with adversing interruptions. Do this instead : magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d56544e6da213a80ab448533c73971fc8e0d9fa8&dn=BBC+Connections+01of10+The+Trigger+Effect+x264+AC3+&tr=udp%3A//tracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A//tracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A//tracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A//open.demonii.com%3A1337

Interesting project!

[Anonymous Coward]

It so happens I have some friends in the SCA who might just survive. They not only know how to spin wool, extract dyes, grow this and that, make candles (not the hippie candles...old-fashioned tallow ones), and so on. They also are book-ish people, so they have books on some of the crafts. I'm not sure this will get us to the plow > steam engine state, but I, at least, have a copy of How Things Work, and a couple of field guides to plants that might come in handy. Oddly, the Zombie Survival Guide has some useful non-zombie tips for after the apocalypse too.

here is another problem

[blackair]

assuming a worse case scenario were this information would be needed. Will anyone still be literate enough to read? in the 1880's 17% of the population could not read,you imagine how bad it would be after a apocalyptic event. It might take more than a generation for the violence and desperation to settle down. in survival mode on a horrific landscape, how many will really take time to teach basic reading. Most likely much of this knowledge will get relearned the hard way.

Was OK until mid or late 19th century

[kbahey]

Things were easy until the mid to late 19th century. Anything could be produced in a carpenter, blacksmith or watchmaker's workshop. Lenses were ground, metals were machined, ...etc.

Then in the early 20th century things started to get far more specialized. By the mid 20th century, we had the transistor then the integrated circuit.

Now, everthing from ubiquitous phones to home appliances to street lights have complicated integrated circuits, CPUs, RAM, ...etc. that can only be designed by specialized teams, and fabricated in very high tech fabs.

I wrote about it here : Information readability and longevity in the digital age.

Oil?

[Second_Derivative]

You can mine coal fairly easily after the apocalypse, sure, but that isn't going to power an internal combustion engine, only an external one.

All of the readily available oil on the planet except for maybe the Arabian Peninsula has been drilled out. New prospecting is almost exclusively performed on oil rigs that are far offshore, which requires a lot of advanced technology to access (such as helicopters, which are powered by, er, oil).

No, if we get bombed back to the stone age then we're staying there. Maybe we can rise up to some liberterian's wet dream of a coal-powered, diseased, and poisonous world of struggling city-states where the average life expectency is 30, but no more than that.

Survivalists

[tehcyder]

Ironically, the one group of people you would least want to survive the Apocalypse.

catch 22

[paai]

If we fall back to the technological level of the middle ages, kickstarting a new 20th-century like civilization is impossible. To create such a civilization, you need energy. Almost all resources like coal and oil have depleted to the point that you need a very complex society to win them. But to exploit sun or wind energy on a sufficient scale, you also need the resources of a large technology pyramid.

Again, if you want to keep individuals to try and recreate our technology, you need a society with a certain level of sophistication so that you can afford people that do not directly work for food prodution.

Catch 22.

Finally, if you want to cut all possible corners in research and production, you need a very strong central governement that keeps the focus on those developments. That will not be possible without a fascistoid state.

Perhaps we should take care to avoid bringing our civilization down.

Paai

Global Village Construction Set

[gregfortune]

A number of years ago, I ran across a similar effort to develop a self sufficient system of tools and technologies to support a "town" called the Global Village Construction Set. It is found at http://opensourceecology.org/w... and it may be an interesting read for anyone thinking about these kinds of issues.

The Zombie Apocalypse

[EmagGeek]

The Sun just bathed Earth in an enormous X-Ray flare, knocking out power globally. Unable to restore power quickly, governments stand idly by bickering while people run out of food and water, and begin the rioting that ultimately causes the demise of civilization.

In the ensuing civil wars, 50% of the population is wiped out, starting with the educated, who are blamed by the bottom rung for the disaster.

The few who remain postwar get together to "reboot" civilization.

"Shit, there are no computers. We're all fucked."

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY what I thought of! When I saw that episode when I was a little one I cried. hard. It's probably the first time I had a genuine emotional response from television. I can still feel the disappointment.

Sell it on HDD

[jago25_98]

Can someone sell it on HDD or DVD for me please? Unreliable connection here...

Centuries too late.

[DerekLyons]

"The Survivor Library is gathering essential knowledge that would be necessary to jump-start modern civilization, should it fail past the point where a simple 'reboot' is possible (video). Much of it (but not all) dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s"

In other words, much of it dates from an era already largely industrialized and with significant long distance transportation and trade. Not very useful for actually rebooting civilization as it presumes the existence of an actual civilization.

2 options

[Anonymous Coward]

When we talk about the end of civilization, we have 2 options:
(1) stockpile things (materials, skills, books) now that will help us then
(2) wait for it to happen then make what we need (harvest materials, learn skills, recreate knowledge) when we need it

Just about everything is easier today that it will be if society collapses, but what preps gives us the best bang-for-the-buck (cost to obtain, and cost to store?)

Knowledge can be easily archived today, but requires power to be useful in the future. The ease of downloading a massive library is one thing. Accessing it in a power-efficient way post-TEOTWAWKI is something else. (I have been working on this since the 1990's.) This requires a huge investment in time. Just organizing such a library can take a lifetime. (Hint: Use the Library of Congress system.)

The obvious source of power is a car's cigarette lighter. If you can not find a working car to recharge your digital library from, you really are screwed. Even Mad Max had easy access to 12V power, or to power from a windmill, or to power from a dilapidated old generator.

The biggest problem with surviving the end of society is that we are physically soft, and used to being able to look up anything on YouTube in a few minutes. WE can drive 20+ miles to get a single piece of wood or a single saw blade. We can mail order anything that is not available in our area.

Comprehensiveness, organization, tools

[Paul Fernhout]

The site seems notable for its comprehensiveness. I also though it would be great if Lindsay Books would have put copies of everything online for free (like via Archive.org) before it shut down, since most of what it had sold were reprints of content now in the public domain. I'm assuming the site in the article may have much the same stuff?
http://www.lindsaybks.com/

While a related project by me hasn't really got going strongly yet, the OSCOMAK project was a hope to organize all this sort of info and more to let people design whatever individual or community infrastructure they wanted. From pages linked here put up around 2000:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"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."

Been plodding along on this idea for a couple decades, but still not much to show... But, still a bit...

Our garden simulator from 1997 was part of this -- to help people learn how to grow their own food in an efficient and sustainable way.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

My hopes for this go back to the 1980s and before, even envisioning something like the world wide web to support it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

No doubt many personal failings and distraction have contributed to my limited progress -- especially the distraction of trying to create better software tools for distributed knowledge sharing and programming like the Pointrel system and PataPapa.

None-the-less, there is also an aspect to which the current economic order is not too keen on such work. As is suggested by John Taylor Gatto:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately sub

100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files???

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know you can just... print the PDFs yourself and put them in a folder, right?

Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets hope they don't have enough knowledge to repeat the 2007 disaster.

What am I wrong about?

[DerekLyons]

You have no clue what you are talking abot

Thirty years of off and on experience with canning and studying food preservation in general, so, yeah... I have no clue what I'm talking "abot" [sic].

So, if that were true - what exactly am I wrong about?

Re:What am I wrong about?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I'll try not to typo -

How much of an industrial civilization is needed to create glass jars, or melt beeswax? Because you can preserve food with those basics.

That's why your statement is mind numbingly clueless.

5 things you need

[DarthVain]

1) Subsistence Farming for Dummies.
2) How to make Beer/Wine/Spirits WTF!
3) Mineral Identification and Exploration
4) Metal Fabrication
5) Gunpowder

#1 and #2 are relatively easy. Spirits without things like copper tubing might be a bit harder, but someone somewhere probably figured out a way to do it.
#3 is a bit troublesome as it isn't something that one person does. It would likely need to involve trade at that point if that is possible.
#4 is predicated on #3, and for fancier things, may require alloys and machinery not easily available or manufactured.
#5 is predicated on #4 and #3, as you will need some sort of rudimentary gunsmiths skills.

However presumably one can construct some shelter, and if you can keep yourself fed, and in booze, you are probably doing OK.

Other ancient trades such as pottery, and cooping (barrel making, which probably require metal bands also), and the like are other such "technologies" that may be useful. Then again, provided you can trade your booze for the other things you may be set! :)

You're completely wrong.

[DerekLyons]

How much of an industrial civilization is needed to create glass jars, or melt beeswax? Because you can preserve food with those basics.

You can't preserve food safely with those basics, no.
 
Why? Because the wax can shrink as it cools, opening a gap between the wax and the jar and allowing microorganisms access to the food. (Improper cleaning or wiping down the jar can also prevent the wax from adhering in the first place.) The wax can also crack or open a gap during storage and handling. There's a reason why, even when people did do this regularly (it is no longer recommended), it's use was limited to jams and jellies - foods that were already semi-stable due to their high sugar content. They were also semi-solid as you can't use this method with any food that's in a liquid (I.E. vegetables, or meat in a broth). You can't use this to can meat *period* because you can't safely can meat without heating and sealing it at high temperatures.
 
Wax hung around a long time because of the pre-scientific belief that all you needed to do to preserve food was to "protect it from the air". We now know it's a lot more complicated than that.
 
 

hat's why your statement is mind numbingly clueless.

You really need to study canning techniques from a current, modern, source - because you're the one that's completely clueless. (Note: Survivalist websites almost by definition do not meet the qualification of being "current and modern". Many canning websites also fail to meet this qualification because they consist of people repeating what they learned at their mother's knee - not current best practices.)

Re:You're completely wrong.

[the_Bionic_lemming]

And just when I thought you hit rock bottom, you grab a pickax and start digging.

So here it is, me and you, you have no lids left - it's years after the apocalypse. You can't preserve any food for the winter.

You laugh at me while I continue to use old canning techniques, Predicting that I will die.

Midway thru winter, I'm spooning preserved apples in my mouth, while you, starving to death still laughs at me because I'm tempting death.

When winter ends, I come over to your house and see that you have propped yourself up against the wall - then died after leaving me a sarcastic and withering letter about how much smarter you are because you know that there's no way on God's green earth that anyone could ever survive like their ancestors did.

Boy, your fancy high fallutin technology and pop science really showed me eh?

And if you are right? We're both dead anyway ;) So in no,way, shape or form can you be correct in this conversation.

Chum...P

Oh, I see where you are failing

[the_Bionic_lemming]

You still are talking about lids.

If you cook the food to where it's free of microbes, then use a Layer of bees wax to cover it, as long as nothing disturbs the bees wax, the food will be preserved.

You do know that bees wax does not rot right? You do know that bees wax from egyptian tombs proves it right? You are assuming that combining modern canning methods with a bees wax lid (not a metal lid) is impossible.

Why don't you actually try to preserve some tomatoes for a year and come back and revisit your own posts.

And that is why you continue to flail.

Re:Oh, I see where you are failing

[Anonymous Coward]

He's been doing it for thirty years. Don't you fucking read?

And the number of things that will (not can, _will_) disturb that beeswax seal is huge, starting with its own deformation during cooling.

How much more of a moron can you prove yourself?

[DerekLyons]

And just when I thought you hit rock bottom, you grab a pickax and start digging.

It only seems that way because your both simultaneously completely and utterly clueless - and completely convinced you're world class expert. (The latter only possible because of the former.)

because you know that there's no way on God's green earth that anyone could ever survive like their ancestors did.

And if you did know what you're talking about - you'd know that our ancestors didn't 'survive the winter' that way - canning is a very recent development historically speaking, post industrial. Our ancestors stored apples in barrels and root cellars, or sliced and dried them. (Because they didn't have access to either the sugar that makes preserves stable or the jars that store them in.) They also depended on a variety of other vegetables and fruits stored the same way. And on dried, smoked, and pickled meats. And on grains and legumes.

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??

[xuchilpaba]

Have you ever heard of glass drives? They can survive a million years

Re: 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files?

[xuchilpaba]

I didn't mean to put this here... It's like slashdot randomly puts my answers somewhere

Re:How much more of a moron can you prove yourself

[the_Bionic_lemming]

canning foods yes, but canning itself has been around for quite a lot longer. I'll also note that you are now flailing and trying to win on semantics.

What was pastuers motivation to can food?

And now that you realize the method I described could work, why are you still digging?

sugar?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

wait - they didn't have access to sugar? So now to "win" you have to go back before 350 ad?

Re:How much more of a moron can you prove yourself

[DerekLyons]

canning foods yes, but canning itself has been around for quite a lot longer. I'll also note that you are now flailing and trying to win on semantics.

Nope, I'm pointing out your multiple errors of fact - you're trying to change it into a semantic argument in a failed attempt to... well, I'm not sure what you're trying to do.
 

What was pastuers motivation to can food?

Since "pastuer" [sic] isn't known for canning food (though his work on germ theory does apply), I'm not at all certain what drugs you're on.
 

And now that you realize the method I described could work, why are you still digging?

I specifically said it wouldn't work. Not in the least because in a post apocalyptic period you're not going to have access to the mass quantities of sugar required.

Anyhow, I'm done playing games with you. Your amusement value is approaching zero and any further beating you about the head and shoulders with facts will just constitute cruelty to dumb animals.

Re:How much more of a moron can you prove yourself

[the_Bionic_lemming]

The only head you were beating was the acorn cap in your pants.

THREAD RECAP --- long post

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Thank you all for participating, even those without a clue.
This is a long recap of the story and its comments.

When I said "Think of the Survivor Library as a trove of survival skills, a '100-year civilization checkpoint backup' that fits on a hard drive." Some didn't get it, thinking it meant burying the Library and a computer for 100 years for someone to dig up. That is not what I meant.

A collapse event could happen never, next year or tomorrow. It could be a impact of a Near Earth Object we have not catalogued, Yellowstone, a pandemic. A political Orwellian slate-wiper followed by a Chairman Mao-style 'revolution', famine and dark age. Or over time, even some ridiculous consumer movement to phase out paper books and do away with autonomous storage altogether in favor of some 'cloud' that a future despot ruler could centrally edit, revoke or just turn off. Yes, we are that stupid.

Your modern civilization has failed you. It provides for you collectively but, because it was never a real priority, as it stands it cannot provide for itself in a time of disaster. It cannot repair itself. Many steps have been taken over the last hundred years, little things, that enabled life to become a bit easier and better. And in key areas (food, energy, communication, transportation) 'best' paths were chosen exclusively over other paths that were not as desirable, maintainable or as economically feasible (though not impossible). Some of these roads not taken were not merely abandoned. Details of the technology that ours was built upon live on only in old books for which few copies exist, that never made it to the Internet age.

When I say '100 year backup' I mean a knowledge backup you could use tomorrow if you need it, to help ensure that normal people like yourself could, with practice and patience, re-create civilization as it was 100 years ago, as an alternative to sliding completely into a medieval existence --- or worse, a Mad Max scavenger based existence where everyone waits for some 'miracle' reboot that never arrives.

Your modern civilization has failed you. You cannot hope to even gather a scope of knowledge such as contained in this Library, for our modern world. That is because it is bound by non-disclosure, proprietary processes, and to catch a glimpse of it you'd need access to a volume of copyrighted textbooks and industry publications that you, oh best beloved, could particularly never afford. There are few lay introductions to how modern technology is actually made put together, and even if you could find them you will never have access to the 'experts' who understand it.

That is because in a real disaster the relatively few experts of any particular field of modern technology will be just like you, disconnected and fighting for survival. Some will not make it. They have specialized because civilization has permitted them to do so, and together we have built something that is foolishly fragile.

Your communications will be down. You will be walking, bicycling or riding horses again. You will be fighting to obtain food, heat (for most, wood) and supplies. And if you weather all of these challenges you and your kids will be asking, what now?

You are conditioned to think of each of everything that surrounds you as the best that has yet been developed, the finest and ultimate of it kind and most advanced. And in many aspects this is true. You may be conditioned to ignore and dismiss older folks who point out exceptions or sound warnings of vulnerability.

For example, the warning I sounded recently here at Slashdot, The Dismantling of POTS: Bold Move Or Grave Error?. Modern civilization has failed you, young people. Your grandparents (I speak of my own United States) grew up with a wired Plain Old Telephone Service that was engineered so that in small communities or even cities people could communi

Re:THREAD RECAP --- long post

[TheRealHocusLocus]

On the subject of stocking up information and entertainment for a future apocalypse,

EXTRA CREDIT. In the 1997 film The Postman, the the Holnists army training camp is set in a large quarry, and in the evening films are shown on a large screen projected from a boat in the quarry lake. The projectionist starts one film, and the crowd becomes irate, throwing rocks at the boat. The projectionist shuts down that film and picks up another reel yelling, "So that's what you want??" and quickly threads it. As it begins the crowd smiles and sits in rapt attention.

What were the two movies?

Re:How much more of a moron can you prove yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you lost. He'd be ok, and you'd be dead of food poisoning because you know literally nothing about food preservation. Game over. Just take your licks like a man and be smarter next time.

You get the Towers from The Mote in God's Eye

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we only need a sex-crazed, gender-changing overpopulation and everything will be like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel.-Ignacio Agulló