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Comment by isostatic | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what that site is, but this is the introduction:

This is a shift of the earth's crust with respect to the earth's core generated north and south magnetic poles. Earth's magnetic poles are created by the flow of ions in the earth's core and is somewhat closely aligned to be parallel to the axis of rotation. We expect about 90 degree shift of the crust as planet-X passes earth's orbit on its way through our solar system. The new North Pole will be off the coast of Brazil and the new South Pole is off the coast of India. It is associated with lots of other earth changes before, during and after the pole shift. See the following description for more details.

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Yeah whoever made this site is bat-shit crazy. But there is tons of great information here. Anything from making soap the old fashioned way to brushed and brushless DC motors. Its really cool and wouldn't be the worst thing to have printed off and saved in a fallout shelter.

>and wouldn't be the worst thing to have printed off and saved in a fallout shelter.

>6922 Files, 14.8 GB

If things get real bad you could always burn it to keep warm.

In print form it's probably a better use of space than a bunch of stuffed animals but I think you're probably better off getting a bunch of cheap android phones and sticking it on the SD card and using most of that space for something else.

I've always thought it might be cool to package up a bunch of literature on a stack of SD cards and package them with a low power e-ink reader and a solar panel to charge it, then market as a "reboot civilization" kit.

The hardest part is actually finding a generic e-ink reader with an sd card slot that doesn't cost $500. It shouldn't need to run full android, just show a PDF or TXT, that's all it needs to do.

An offline wikipedia dump, emergency medical manual and PDR, survival manuals, etc etc like this site might go well.

http://thewikireader.com/ update: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-distribute-wikireade...

I don't have one - my phone contains an offline wikipedia dump (including images), offline maps of the world including geological maps, medical manual, and my book collection, including things like http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/.

I've got a vague plan to download the primitive technology youtube videos too.

So once "the end" comes, you'll be set for a good 4 hours before your phone runs out of battery?

You could recharge your phone using sticks (https://www.rei.com/product/115523/biolite-wood-burning-camp...) or a solar panel.

I wonder what the longevity of something like that is. And for solar panels what do you do if it's a supervolcano that blocks out the sun? The real solution is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which will give you a few hundred watts for decades. But I don't think they sell those online...

My phone lasts a good 20 hours!

Also, I do have a solar cell, but yeah, modern phones aren't really designed for post apocalyptic conditions surprisingly.

Fortunately, all that is also useful in tunnels, underground bars, the countryside and when travelling abroad.

For what it's worth, I have an old cheap LG phone that I once accidentally sent through the laundry and it was fine.

By offline Wikipedia dump, you mean Kiwix?

(https://www.kiwix.org/)

Well Kiwix is the reader software rather than the dump. I use a huge dump that includes images, but there are lots of choices inluding other reference works and in other languages (useful for learning). I've used a number of different offline readers over the years, TomeRaider, Aard, but kiwix is the one I use at the moment.

Wait, is there anybody else other than the guys behind Kiwix who regularly make compact archives of Wikipedia? The only place I know of where you can download a premade archive (rather than archive it yourself) is off their servers.

I don't know about regular, but there are lots of dumps out there, and you can make them yourself if you have your own preferred format. Lots more information here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Anyone that has messed with a Raspberry Pi will tell you that you don't want to hang the hopes of humanity being rebooted on a consumer-grade SD card. And since I'm nit-picking, any scenario necessitating the rebooting of civilization might very well involve something that fries SD cards and takes the silicon in your solar panel with it (nukes, big solar flare thingy).

Boy Scout Field Guide and an Army survival manual, sorted.

Nukes and solar flares can be protected against: just seal your electronics in a good faraday cage. Putting them in an underground bunker in a lead-lined room should do it.

Your paper books won't last as long: today's paper is acidic and falls apart within a century.

> Your paper books won't last as long: today's paper is acidic and falls apart within a century.

I love old books, and this saddens me.

How old? If you like books that are more than a century or so old, then don't worry, those books were made with high-quality paper that really does last. It's the books in the 20th century that won't. (Some might, higher-quality ones say "printed on acid-free paper", so theoretically those will age as well as books made in the 1800s.)

You can buy acid free archival paper that will last 500 years with careful storage. It costs ~3-5x as much, but is available.

You can, but you're probably not going to find whatever books the OP was referring to printed on that paper. You'll have to scan them and print them on that paper yourself (assuming that laser toner will also last as long; probably so, given it's basically melted plastic, but I'm not sure).

Most of the discussion was around things like Wikipedia and other internet knowledge which you would have to print anyway. For books you would buy, or course what the publisher will agree to sell you is a limit - and you are probably not big enough to get an acid-free version printed.

Though if civilization collapsed bad enough to need this I think most of the useful information I'd want saved was published in the 1800s and so out of copyright. We wouldn't be able to use the knowledge of how to make a transistor until long after even acid free paper was useless.

>We wouldn't be able to use the knowledge of how to make a transistor until long after even acid free paper was useless.

What are you talking about? Transistors don't require some huge industrial base to build; the first one was made with some gold and a germanium crystal. A lot of technologies don't build on top of older technologies, they bypass them altogether. Your rebooted civilization does not need to go through a phase with fossil-fuel-burning cars to get to electric vehicles, for instance. A rebooted civilization, with stored knowledge of modern technology and enough smart people able to make use of that knowledge would be able to get back to current tech levels pretty quickly, and probably avoid most of the mistakes of the past as well.

As for useful information from the 1800s, that would mean you're losing all the modern medical knowledge, which is pretty important, and much of which does not require advanced technology to utilize. Back then, they barely even understood germs and the importance of washing hands (surgeons didn't even bother!). That alone saves tons of lives, and requires no real technology at all.

I can make a simple transistor, but what good will it do me? Modern electronics needs billions of them - something I cannot do, and the details to scale my simple transistor require a large society to make use of.

I do agree that there are a lot of things we have learned that do apply, but a lot of modern medicine requires laboratories that we wouldn't be able to build. Hand washing only goes so far, can you make a polio vaccine in your kitchen? Can you make an ibuprofen pill - pure enough to safely use?

I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted. I have begun to wonder if I am the only sane man remaining. Can the others not see?

Sneaky Mistborn reference!

Why would you seal your electronics in a Faraday cage to protect them against solar flares? Solar flares won't affect them.

Just have some monks transcribe the books every century or so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

The original Kindle has an SD card slot, swappable battery, and is available on eBay for cheap.

Right, like that, but where do I get new ones with similar specs to VAR? There don't seem to be any.

Almost room for a new hardware platform here.

> "reboot civilization" kit

Or, as was known in Fallout, the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K.)

It's a thing in the prepping community. The "package up a bunch of literature" (in electronic form) predates e-readers even, and there are many multi-gigabyte bundles of books and technical manuals floating around, just copied from person to person. When readers appeared, they were quickly incorporated.

Finding a e-ink reader like that is very easy: just go to eBay, and grab any of the used Nook Simple Touch on sale. Can be had for less than $20 if you look around, and it has an SD card slot.

Look at the Kobo brand of e-readers; mine was pretty cheap and automatically accesses any epubs on the microsd card inserted.

(Probably other formats too, but epubs are all I use)

When I was interested in “survival” type topics back in the 80’s, there were a few magazines devoted to the topic, and I remember an ad for a large collection/library of useful basic information (how to make soap, butcher an animal, etc.) all placed on microfilm cards and came with a simple mechanical magnifier/reader. No power or fancy tech required.

The site recommends building domes out of Sulphur. That doesn't seem like very good advice. As a non-expert in survival, I'd be wary of trusting anything written by a person with a creative interpretation of what's real and what isn't. You never know what else they're having unconventional opinions of.

Yeah, we don't want any unconventional ideas to slip through; cause that might lead to changes, and evolution and all sorts of scary shit.

Yeah, in a life-or-death situation after Planet X realigns the poles, I definitely don't want the experimental survival guide when proven methods exists. I leave the bold changes to bolder people.

"shift of the earth's crust"

So the movie 2012 was based on existing daft ideas or did they get those ideas from the movie?

"shift of the earth's crust with respect to the [...] magnetic poles"

This is not incorrect, even if it is a little garden-pathy.

It'd still be far more accurate were "crust" and "magnetic poles" flipped in the statement.

I stopped reading at "as planet-X passes earth's orbit".

I skipped ahead to figure out when they claimed it was going to happen. The document is dated 2013. The summary of the results basically says "calculate it yourself, it's not our fault if it's wrong, but 2014 and 2017 look like the best dates."

I wonder why doomsayers keep predicting the end of the world to be in the imminent future? It makes it way too easy to be proven wrong.

Because no one would care if it was too far in the future?

I once had an idea for an erratically-scheduled holiday called "arbitrary apocalypse day". The day after each AAD if the world hasn't ended, you'd roll a D-10 3 times to get a number of days between 0 and 999, and that's the new predicted apocalypse date. You'd select a cause at random (i.e. nanobots, aliens, meteor, supervolcano, nuclear war, pandemic, etc...) and tell everyone that doom is nigh.

In the end, I didn't promote it heavily and forgot to celebrate on the appointed day (or choose the next date). Maybe I should start it back up again.

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