How Can We Create a Manual for Civilization? (2017)
longnow.org
longnow.org
Open Source Ecology
"...currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker."
We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy – an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration."
From a science point-of-view, a lot of progress was just about figuring out things we didn't know (obviously). Things like we live in a spheroid planet that orbits a Sun and matter is made up of ~93 naturally occurring elements and a bunch of others we can make. Those elements are made up of atoms that are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.
I just summarized what took millenia to figure out originally. You'd likely never have to figure that out again and that would greatly accelerate any progress from bashing rocks together to building rockets.
So the issue then is how do you preserve information. The more information dense storage methods require more technology and/or don't last as long. The longest method of information preservation we have thus far is probably clay tablets.
I wonder how long ink and paper could survive in a vacuum chamber.
And then we get into what to preserve (in this article). This project includes works of literature and other cultural texts. This seems to be rather arbitrary to me. I mean in 1,000 years will people have the same cultural context to appreciate that? What about in a million years?
We're already selective in what we retain and learn because there's simply too much. If, like me, you believe a Dyson Swarm is humanity's future then this problem gets much worse. I read once that if we had a full Dyson Swarm around the Sun, you could write one page about each orbital and have millions of pages, more than any person could ever read. At that's one page about the entire history and culture of each orbital, each being possibly millions of people.
The very idea of a universal culture seems absurd in such a situation.
> The Knowledge is a journey of discovery, a book which explains everything you need to know about everything. This is a quick-start guide for rebooting civilisation which will transform your understanding of the world – and help you prepare for when it’s no longer here…
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/buy-the-book/
Along with the books in its bibliography:
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/
Further references on medical knowledge and Germ Theory would be good, especially on how to make soap and how to create microscopes so we can see germs.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
A book on anatomy would be useful too so we don't have to rediscover what various bits and pieces and parts do.
When you learn practical skills, like how to fix your bike, how to solder, how to find good iron ore, your best bet is to learn from a real person so you can exprerience all the intangiable things that go with learning a skill.
A youtube video course is the closest substitute i guess.
>> The Knowledge is a journey of discovery, a book which explains everything you need to know about everything. This is a quick-start guide for rebooting civilisation which will transform your understanding of the world – and help you prepare for when it’s no longer here…
> I agree with the topics chosen, but I fear a lot of this information [could] be very hypothetical, like a wikipedia article does not enable you to reproduce the same results.
It almost certainly is. The book is 352 pages, according to Amazon, so at best it's a extremely high-level outline.
An actual manual would be very long and tedious, and certainly wouldn't sell well as a popular book. I'd imagine it would be at least a couple times larger than a collection of all the undergrad textbooks for all the practical courses at a decent university circa 1950 (you've got to get the concepts, plus important implementation details).
A manual for bootstrapping a subsistence farming community would probably be a lot shorter and more practical.
(Just kidding, don't hurt me)
To the extent that we have a "manual for civilization" in the present day - and there are lots of really unresolved questions! - the same problem applies.
Spending a lot of effort on something like this seems akin to writing a letter to the next tenant for your apartment while you should be working to keep your job so you can stay in the apartment.
The focus should be mainly history with some foundational scientific works.
Or don't try to preserve anything. If a future civilization needs it then the current civilization obviously messed up big time and don't deserve to say anything else. Our shameful wreckage will be ubiquitous and apparent to any future inhabitants. Just die quietly and leave it at that.
"we clearly failed" is catastrophising the current situation and is a defeatist attitude.
The use case for a "Manual for Civilization" is a scenario where we have failed, so it's a valid assumption when considering something like this.
It might be pretty unwise to create such a manual, because it would almost certainly be a manual for repeating the last set of mistakes.
If our civilization as it is survives and does not collapse, then this "manual" is unnecessary.
It is only useful if our civilization has clearly failed.
Maybe sanitation was a huge mistake. Maybe antibiotics were a huge mistake. Maybe the remnants of humanity that survive the apocalypse will look back on a humanity all but wiped out by superbugs of their own making.
Maybe agriculture was a huge mistake. Maybe the march towards monocultures is inevitable, and the remnants of humanity that survive the apocalypse will look back on a humanity all but wiped out by blights or the total depletion of fertile topsoil.
For anything that we wish to impart to these remnants, there's a scenario where that is why we failed, because we must assume that we did fail to justify the attempt at the manual at all.
Alternatively, hook the reader with the power of the nuclear weaponry, and write with an unironic lack of self awareness. Trust the reader to read between the lines. What could possibly go wrong?
In the hypothetical, our civilization has failed and a new group is trying to use this manual to start up civilization again. Who is to say that one of the things that we think we got wrong would, in fact, have saved our civilization?
To put it differently [1]:
> Who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilizations?
Because it could be not-failed at Time F but failed at Time X, and somewhere between the two a bad decision was made. If you know what the previous civ did, you can perhaps learn from their mistakes and bootstrap yourself until the bad branch point and take a different path at that point.
Anyway, who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilization? Presuming ours(?) failed and the manual is needed.
To get a civilization, you will need to have 10s to 100s of thousands of people living in close proximity?