Ask HN: Source to Rebuilding Civilization? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Source to Rebuilding Civilization?

4 pointsallovernow7 comments

You're watching the gradual unfolding of an apocalyptic event. You have a week to prepare. What do you save? How do you get access to it?

Your goal is to hasten the rebuilding of civilization. Anything on a computer is fair game.

This thread has a purpose. Modern technology has given us an unprecedented, largely decentralized access to the majority of institutional human knowledge. As developers, we are natural vanguards to maintain this knowledge in times of global crisis. I'm sure other organizations to this end already exist, but a fresh take by outsiders is always refreshing.

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Used books. Buy from Amazon. They're dirt cheap. Ideas - without knowing what the event entails:

1. First aid

2. Home medicine

3. Edible local plants

4. Hunting, especially building traps from local materials and deploying them

5. Low-tech water purification techniques

6. Basic carpentry

7. Newton's Principia, because at some point things will start getting better.

Electronic media require too much infrastructure to use. They degrade much faster than paper. Books on electronic media can be collected - just don't expect to be able to use them.

If the event is known, then the book list can be adjusted. For example, if it's nuclear, then "The Nuclear War Survival Guide" is a must-have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills

If there really is an apocalypse your only goal is to survive it. Historically, apocalyptic events result in multigenerational dark ages, because the goal is survival even as population rebounds.

Also, historically speaking, most population groups refuse civilization when provided the option. The visible concern to non-civilized groups when gazing upon civilization are loss of independence, loss of social equality, and social restrictions. Typically groups only accept civilization once wealth becomes sufficiently abundant, military defense of fixed areas requires fixed resources, and influence becomes more important than wealth.

That being said I would take no preparations to rebuild civilization.

I say goodbye to my loved ones, preferably in person (though transportation and infrastructure would come to a halt as everyone else had the same idea). In addition I would come to terms with my premature end and enjoy some natural landscapes.

What you're forgetting is the ingenious yet frustrating quality of children to summarily reject almost all faith and/or dogma their parents foist upon them. That tied together with the hundreds of years it would take to rebuild a civilization and you have a simple recipe to frustrate any realistic prepper with ambitions of accelerating the good-old-bad-days (aka the bad-old-good-days).

'Anything on a computer is fair game.'

Well then I vote Sid Meiers Civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

Is the Coronavirus that bad?

There is also the question of long term physical storage. To my recent horror I've found that none of our current memory media, from NAND to disc to tape, last more than thirty or so years before physically degrading. Other than the M-disc, which claims long lasting media, there doesn't appear to be any digital form of storage accessible to the layman that can last anywhere near as long as paper!

Doctor Stone's father sent him a message in the form of a phonograph album etched in glass (the bottom of a bottle). Lasted for thousands of years when embedded in concrete.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/dr-stone/episode-24-voices-over-...

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