I’m also going to mention The City of Ember, a children’s/young adult novel, (also made into a passable 2008 film of the same name). The premise of The City of Ember is a subterranean city that maintains the glowing embers of humanity in the event of global catastrophe. None of the residents of Ember have any knowledge of their city’s purpose, or of the wider world. The city is in a state of considerable disrepair, having been running beyond its intended operational lifespan, and this is what drives the story.
To my mind, it seems one of the biggest problems of preserving information for post-catastrophe societies is literacy. Guaranteeing a common written language with the survivors of a cataclysmic event (or their descendants, to whom literacy might not be an important skill) seems like a tricky proposition. If you leave a big pile of books for people to find, and no-one’s capable of reading them, the whole enterprise is a wasted effort.
Here’s where Ember comes in: humans speaking a living language can teach that language to other humans they encounter. Would it be possible to preserve literacy, (as well as other notions of civilisation like agriculture, governance and cat pictures) in an Ember-like environment? By this I mean a sheltered society with sufficient capital surplus to maintain a high level of literacy, not necessarily a ruinous subterranean city governed by Bill Murray.
Kind of crackpotty. You have been warned.
I’m going to mention the Global Village Construction Set, which I think is interesting, and The Georgia Guidestones, which are a different kind of interesting.
I’m also going to mention The City of Ember, a children’s/young adult novel, (also made into a passable 2008 film of the same name). The premise of The City of Ember is a subterranean city that maintains the glowing embers of humanity in the event of global catastrophe. None of the residents of Ember have any knowledge of their city’s purpose, or of the wider world. The city is in a state of considerable disrepair, having been running beyond its intended operational lifespan, and this is what drives the story.
To my mind, it seems one of the biggest problems of preserving information for post-catastrophe societies is literacy. Guaranteeing a common written language with the survivors of a cataclysmic event (or their descendants, to whom literacy might not be an important skill) seems like a tricky proposition. If you leave a big pile of books for people to find, and no-one’s capable of reading them, the whole enterprise is a wasted effort.
Here’s where Ember comes in: humans speaking a living language can teach that language to other humans they encounter. Would it be possible to preserve literacy, (as well as other notions of civilisation like agriculture, governance and cat pictures) in an Ember-like environment? By this I mean a sheltered society with sufficient capital surplus to maintain a high level of literacy, not necessarily a ruinous subterranean city governed by Bill Murray.
If you use a phonetic alphabet, literacy isn’t that hard. You do still have to keep the language from changing.