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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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???

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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?

[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.

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"

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...

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

[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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 ...

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.

Re:The Encyclopedists

[Holi]

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