Suppose you know from good sources that there is going to be a huge catastrophe in the very near future, which will result in the near-extermination of humanity (but the natural environment will recover more easily). You and a small group of ordinary men and women will have to restart from scratch.
You have a limited time to compile a compendium of knowledge to preserve for the new era. What is the most important knowledge to preserve?
I am humbled by how poorly my own personal knowledge would fare.
I suspect that people are overestimating in their replies how much could be done with Wikipedia. People in general underestimate a) how much technology requires bootstrapping (metallurgy is a great example of this) b) how much many technologies, even primitive ones, require large populations so that specialization, locational advantages and comparative advantage can kick in (People even in not very technologically advanced cultures have had tech levels regress when they settle large islands or when their locations get cut off from the mainland. Tasmania is the classical example of this. The inability to trade with the mainland caused large drops in tech level). So while Wikipedia makes sense, it would also be helpful to have a lot of details on do-it-yourself projects that could use pre-existing remnants of existing technology. There are a lot of websites and books devoted to that topic, so that shouldn’t be too hard.
If we are reducing to a small population, we may need also to focus on getting through the first one or two generations with an intact population. That means that a handful of practical books on field surgery, midwifing, and similar basic medical issues may become very necessary.
Also, when you specify “ordinary men and women” do you mean who all speak the same language? And do you mean by “ordinary” roughly developed world countries? That’s what many people seem to mean when questions like this are proposed. They could alter things considerably. For example, if it really is a random sample, then inter-language dictionaries will be very important. But, if the sample involves some people from the developing world, they are more likely to have some of the knowledge base for working in a less technologically advanced situation that people in the developed world will lack (even this may only be true to a very limited extent because the tech level of the developing world is in many respects very high compared to the tech level of humans for most of human history. Many countries described as developing world are in better shape than for example much of Europe in the Middle Ages.)
how much technology requires bootstrapping (metallurgy is
a great example of this)
I would love to see a reality TV show about a metallurgy
expert making a knife or other metal tool from scratch. The
expert would be provided food and shelter but would have no
equipment or materials for making metal, and so would have
to find and dig up the ore themselves, build their own oven,
and whatever else you would have to do to make metal if you
were transported to the stone age.
Yes, this is in fact connected to a general problem that Nick Bostrom has pointed out, each time you try to go back from stone age tech to modern tech you use resources up that you won’t have the next time. However, for purposes of actually getting back to high levels of technology rather than having a fun reality show, we’ve got a few advantages. One can use the remaining metal that is in all the left over objects from modern civilization (cars being one common easy source of a number of metals). Some metals are actually very difficult to extract from ore (aluminum is the primary example of this. Until the technologies for extraction were developed, it was expensive and had almost no uses) whereas the ruins of civilization will have those metals in near pure forms if one knows where to look.
Locations of pre-disaster settlements to be used as supply caches. Locations of structures to be used for defense. Locations of physical resources for ongoing exploitation: water, fisheries, quarries. Locations of no travel zones to avoid pathogens.
Presupposing that only a limited amount of knowledge could be saved seems wrong. You could bury petabytes of data in digital form, then print out a few books’ worth of hints for getting back to the technology level necessary to read it.
Let’s examine the problem in more detail: Different disaster scenarios would require different pieces of information, so it would help if you knew exactly what kind of catastrophe. However, if you can preserve a very large compendium of knowledge, then you can create a catalogue of necessary information for almost every type of doomsday scenario (nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, etc.) so that you will be prepared for almost anything. If the amount of information you can save is more limited, then you should save the pieces of information that are the most likely to be useful in any given scenario in “catastrophe-space.” Now we have to go about determining what these pieces of information are. We can start by looking at the most likely doomsday scenarios—Yoreth, since you started the thread, what do you think the most likely ones are?
I suppose, perhaps, an asteroid impact or nuclear holocaust? It’s hard for me to imagine a disaster that wipes out 99.999999% of the population but doesn’t just finish the job. The scenario is more a prompt to provoke examination of the amount of knowledge our civilization relies on.
(What first got me thinking about this was the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth. But you would be hard pressed to restart civilization from a space station, at least at current tech levels.)
The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth’s population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we’ve been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is “irreducibly complex”—for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).
the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth.
I am not following this. Why would the anthropic principle no longer apply if you went into space?
I think it’s a quantum immortality argument. If you, the observer, are no longer on Earth, the Earth can be destroyed because its destruction no longer necessitates your death.
A dead tree copy of Wikipedia. A history book about ancient handmade tools and techniques from prehistory to now. A bunch of K-12 school books about math and science. Also as many various undergraduate and postgraduate level textbooks as possible.
Wikipedia is a great answer because we know that most but no all the information is good. Some is nonsense. This will force the future generations to question and maybe develop their own ‘science’ rather than worship the great authority of ‘the old and holy books’.
The knowledge about science issues generally tracks our current understanding very well. And historical knowledge that is wrong will be extremely difficult for people to check post an apocalyptic event, and even then is largely correct. In fact, if Wikipedia’s science content really were bad enough to matter it would be an awful thing to bring into this situation since having correct knowledge or not could alter whether or not humanity survives at all.
A dead-tree copy of Wikipedia has been estimated at around 1,420 volumes. Here’s an illustration, with a human for scale. It’s big. You might as well go for broke and hole up in a library when the Big Catastrophe happens.
But the WikiReader is probably a step in the right direction that is worth mentioning.
While most of the current technology depend on many other technology to be useful (cellular phones need cellular networks, most gadgets won’t last a day on their internal batteries etc), the WikiReader is a welcome step in the direction less travelled. I only hope that we will have more of that.
That seems like advice for living in the woods—not a bad idea, but it probably needs to be adjusted for different environments (find water in dry land, staying warm in extreme cold, etc.) and especially for scavenging from ruins.
Any thoughts about people skills you’d need after the big disaster?
I thought about those a bit, but came to a few conclusions that made sense to me.
Being in a very dry land is simply a bad idea, best to move. Any group of survivors that is more than three days from fresh water won’t be survivors, and once they’ve made it to the fresh water source there won’t be many reasons to stray far from it for at least a couple generations, so water-finding skills will probably not be useful and be quickly lost.
Staying warm in extreme cold would be covered both by the fire-starting skills and the bow-making skills.
I wanted to put something about people skills, but I don’t have any myself and didn’t know what I could possibly say that would be remotely useful. Hopefully someone with more experience on that subject will survive as well. :)
I’m tempted to say “a university library” as the short answer. More specifically, whatever I could get from the science and engineering departments. Pick the classic works in each field if you have someone to filter them. Look for stuff that’s more universal than specific to the way we’ve done things—in computing terms, you want The Art of Computer Programming and not The C Programming Language.
In the short term, anything you can find on farming and primitive medicine—all the stuff the better class of survivalist would have on their bookshelf.
Depends what level you want to achieve post-catastrophe; some, if not most of your resources and knowledge will be needed to deal with specific effects. In short, your suitcase will be full of survivalist and medical material.
In an thought experiment where you freeze yourself until the ecosystem is restored, you can probably use an algorithm of taking the best library materials from each century, corrected for errors, to achieve the level of that century.
Both Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island” and explore similar bootstrapping scenarios, interestingly both use some “outside injections”.
Suppose you know from good sources that there is going to be a huge catastrophe in the very near future, which will result in the near-extermination of humanity (but the natural environment will recover more easily). You and a small group of ordinary men and women will have to restart from scratch.
You have a limited time to compile a compendium of knowledge to preserve for the new era. What is the most important knowledge to preserve?
I am humbled by how poorly my own personal knowledge would fare.
I suspect that people are overestimating in their replies how much could be done with Wikipedia. People in general underestimate a) how much technology requires bootstrapping (metallurgy is a great example of this) b) how much many technologies, even primitive ones, require large populations so that specialization, locational advantages and comparative advantage can kick in (People even in not very technologically advanced cultures have had tech levels regress when they settle large islands or when their locations get cut off from the mainland. Tasmania is the classical example of this. The inability to trade with the mainland caused large drops in tech level). So while Wikipedia makes sense, it would also be helpful to have a lot of details on do-it-yourself projects that could use pre-existing remnants of existing technology. There are a lot of websites and books devoted to that topic, so that shouldn’t be too hard.
If we are reducing to a small population, we may need also to focus on getting through the first one or two generations with an intact population. That means that a handful of practical books on field surgery, midwifing, and similar basic medical issues may become very necessary.
Also, when you specify “ordinary men and women” do you mean who all speak the same language? And do you mean by “ordinary” roughly developed world countries? That’s what many people seem to mean when questions like this are proposed. They could alter things considerably. For example, if it really is a random sample, then inter-language dictionaries will be very important. But, if the sample involves some people from the developing world, they are more likely to have some of the knowledge base for working in a less technologically advanced situation that people in the developed world will lack (even this may only be true to a very limited extent because the tech level of the developing world is in many respects very high compared to the tech level of humans for most of human history. Many countries described as developing world are in better shape than for example much of Europe in the Middle Ages.)
I would love to see a reality TV show about a metallurgy expert making a knife or other metal tool from scratch. The expert would be provided food and shelter but would have no equipment or materials for making metal, and so would have to find and dig up the ore themselves, build their own oven, and whatever else you would have to do to make metal if you were transported to the stone age.
One problem you would face with such a show is if the easily-available ore is gone.
Yes, this is in fact connected to a general problem that Nick Bostrom has pointed out, each time you try to go back from stone age tech to modern tech you use resources up that you won’t have the next time. However, for purposes of actually getting back to high levels of technology rather than having a fun reality show, we’ve got a few advantages. One can use the remaining metal that is in all the left over objects from modern civilization (cars being one common easy source of a number of metals). Some metals are actually very difficult to extract from ore (aluminum is the primary example of this. Until the technologies for extraction were developed, it was expensive and had almost no uses) whereas the ruins of civilization will have those metals in near pure forms if one knows where to look.
The argument that no one person in the face of Earth knows how to build a mouse from scratch is plausible.
Matt Ridley
A person buys ore, builds a smelter out of cement, and makes a sword.
Terry Pratchett digs up ore near his house, smelts it in “a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure”, and makes a sword. Also included: meteorites!
Thank you Hacker News.
He [pratchett] has to hide it from the authorities.
Maps.
Locations of pre-disaster settlements to be used as supply caches. Locations of structures to be used for defense. Locations of physical resources for ongoing exploitation: water, fisheries, quarries. Locations of no travel zones to avoid pathogens.
Presupposing that only a limited amount of knowledge could be saved seems wrong. You could bury petabytes of data in digital form, then print out a few books’ worth of hints for getting back to the technology level necessary to read it.
If the resources for printing are still handy. I don’t feel comfortable counting on that at present levels of technology.
In rough order of addition to the corpus of knowledge:
The scientific method.
Basic survival skills (e.g. navigation).
Edit: Basic agriculture (e.g. animal husbandry, crop cultivation).
Calculus.
Classical mechanics.
Basic chemistry.
Basic medicine.
Basic political science.
Basic sanitation!
Yes! Insert sanitation between 3 and 4, and insert construction (e.g. whittling, carpentry, metal casting) between sanitation and 3.
For survival skills, I’d suggest buying this one before the disaster, while there’s still internet.
Let’s examine the problem in more detail: Different disaster scenarios would require different pieces of information, so it would help if you knew exactly what kind of catastrophe. However, if you can preserve a very large compendium of knowledge, then you can create a catalogue of necessary information for almost every type of doomsday scenario (nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, etc.) so that you will be prepared for almost anything. If the amount of information you can save is more limited, then you should save the pieces of information that are the most likely to be useful in any given scenario in “catastrophe-space.” Now we have to go about determining what these pieces of information are. We can start by looking at the most likely doomsday scenarios—Yoreth, since you started the thread, what do you think the most likely ones are?
I suppose, perhaps, an asteroid impact or nuclear holocaust? It’s hard for me to imagine a disaster that wipes out 99.999999% of the population but doesn’t just finish the job. The scenario is more a prompt to provoke examination of the amount of knowledge our civilization relies on.
(What first got me thinking about this was the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth. But you would be hard pressed to restart civilization from a space station, at least at current tech levels.)
The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth’s population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we’ve been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is “irreducibly complex”—for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).
I am not following this. Why would the anthropic principle no longer apply if you went into space?
I think it’s a quantum immortality argument. If you, the observer, are no longer on Earth, the Earth can be destroyed because its destruction no longer necessitates your death.
A dead tree copy of Wikipedia. A history book about ancient handmade tools and techniques from prehistory to now. A bunch of K-12 school books about math and science. Also as many various undergraduate and postgraduate level textbooks as possible.
Wikipedia is a great answer because we know that most but no all the information is good. Some is nonsense. This will force the future generations to question and maybe develop their own ‘science’ rather than worship the great authority of ‘the old and holy books’.
The knowledge about science issues generally tracks our current understanding very well. And historical knowledge that is wrong will be extremely difficult for people to check post an apocalyptic event, and even then is largely correct. In fact, if Wikipedia’s science content really were bad enough to matter it would be an awful thing to bring into this situation since having correct knowledge or not could alter whether or not humanity survives at all.
Wikipedia would also contain a lot of info about current people and places, which would no longer be remotely useful.
And a lot of popular culture which would no longer be available.
A dead-tree copy of Wikipedia has been estimated at around 1,420 volumes. Here’s an illustration, with a human for scale. It’s big. You might as well go for broke and hole up in a library when the Big Catastrophe happens.
One of these http://thewikireader.com/ with rechargeable batteries and a solar charger could work.
Until some critical part oxidates or otherwise breaks. Which will likely be a long time before the new society is able to build a replacement.
But the WikiReader is probably a step in the right direction that is worth mentioning.
While most of the current technology depend on many other technology to be useful (cellular phones need cellular networks, most gadgets won’t last a day on their internal batteries etc), the WikiReader is a welcome step in the direction less travelled. I only hope that we will have more of that.
How to start a fire only using sticks.
How to make a cutting blade from rocks.
How to create a bow, and make arrows.
Basic sanitation.
That seems like advice for living in the woods—not a bad idea, but it probably needs to be adjusted for different environments (find water in dry land, staying warm in extreme cold, etc.) and especially for scavenging from ruins.
Any thoughts about people skills you’d need after the big disaster?
I thought about those a bit, but came to a few conclusions that made sense to me.
Being in a very dry land is simply a bad idea, best to move. Any group of survivors that is more than three days from fresh water won’t be survivors, and once they’ve made it to the fresh water source there won’t be many reasons to stray far from it for at least a couple generations, so water-finding skills will probably not be useful and be quickly lost.
Staying warm in extreme cold would be covered both by the fire-starting skills and the bow-making skills.
I wanted to put something about people skills, but I don’t have any myself and didn’t know what I could possibly say that would be remotely useful. Hopefully someone with more experience on that subject will survive as well. :)
I’m tempted to say “a university library” as the short answer. More specifically, whatever I could get from the science and engineering departments. Pick the classic works in each field if you have someone to filter them. Look for stuff that’s more universal than specific to the way we’ve done things—in computing terms, you want The Art of Computer Programming and not The C Programming Language.
In the short term, anything you can find on farming and primitive medicine—all the stuff the better class of survivalist would have on their bookshelf.
I only need one item:
The Holy Bible
(kidding)
Depends what level you want to achieve post-catastrophe; some, if not most of your resources and knowledge will be needed to deal with specific effects. In short, your suitcase will be full of survivalist and medical material.
In an thought experiment where you freeze yourself until the ecosystem is restored, you can probably use an algorithm of taking the best library materials from each century, corrected for errors, to achieve the level of that century.
Both Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island” and explore similar bootstrapping scenarios, interestingly both use some “outside injections”.