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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.
That makes zero sense.
Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
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