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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
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.