Ask Slashdot: Permanent Preservation of Human Knowledge? 277
Wayne2 writes "While there have been many attempts to preserve human knowledge in electronic format, it occurred to me that these attempts all assume that human civilization remains more or less intact. Given humanity's history of growth and collapse with knowledge repeatedly gained then lost, has anyone considered a more permanent solution? I realize that this could be very difficult and/or expensive depending on how long we want to preserve the information and what assumptions we make regarding posterity's ability to access it. Alternatively, are we, as a species, willing to start over if we experience a catastrophe, pandemic, etc. of significant magnitude on a global scale that derails our progress and sends us back to the dark ages or worse?"
A Canticle... (Score:5, Interesting)
...for Leibowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz [wikipedia.org]
Books (Score:4, Interesting)
Books. It worked before, it should work again.
The electronic preservation angle was my wife's thesis.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf [cyberstreet.com]
Re:Already Been Invented: Fired Ceramic Tablets (Score:5, Interesting)
Deadman switch courier ships (Score:5, Interesting)
Periodically send up long distance spacecraft loaded with not just data but the means to view it and the means to rebuild from first principles, assuming a child was viewing it - here is how you find iron deposits, mine and refine them, this is how you forge ploughs, these are the basics of algebra. Have them programmed to circle around somewhere just inside Jupiter's orbit, and have multiple stations here on earth sending out a deadman signal - when they stop broadcasting, the vessels begin to return in waves seperated by ten years or so, with the last waves arriving once a century.
When they make it home, have them attempt to locate likely inhabited areas whether by thermal imaging looking for fires at night or just vegetation profiling for fields, then drop down nearby, broadcasting light and sound, even radio, until someone comes to investigate.
It's relatively easy to permanently preserve all of mankind's knowledge, just pack it in a rocket and send it Oort-cloud bound. Well permanently as in astronomical timescales. The trick is to preserve all of humanity's knowledge in a way that's useful to humanity in the future.
Re:useless without infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
It does mean though, that the information should be prioritized - there's a T-shirt/poster floating around the internet full of "things to take credit for discovering if you go back in time". Most of the items it lists are either critical discoveries that led directly to improvements in quality of life, or were the basis for other technologies. Pasteurization, antibiotics, electric generation, radio, flight, and more. (It's here [geekologie.com] by the way.)
A guide like that is a good start - build things up in stages, add in more (useful) detail, never assuming that the reader will already have a tool unless it has already been explained how to make it. Then if you want to go hog-wild, after you've reached the part explaining how to make a computer and digitize information, put the stuff that would require a heavily industrialized civilization into a digitized code format and explain how it's encoded, so they can read it when they're ready/able to use it.
Random data being used for research though, is likely totally useless. Not only is the DNA/RNA sequence from that rat likely to be useless to a recovering civilization, depending on what sort of cataclysm happened, the DNA/RNA of a rat may not even match what was recorded. Leave stuff like that to DNA/Seed banks, unless it's part of an explanation of "what DNA/RNA is", and even then, the whole set is pointless. (Also probably patented.) A Tokamak reactor may not be useful to a low tech civilization, but with the boost provided by being taught how to make hydro-electric generators, lights, heaters, radios, and internal combustion engines (they can run on cheaply made alcohol, they're just less efficient that way, and wear out faster.), they might be able to make use of that information in only a few generations.
The real problem of course, is format, and ensuring that not only does the information survive, but that these future people are able to understand it when they do see it, rather than thinking "Oh, pretty metal plates with squiggles on them. I bet I could melt those down and make a great set of knives out of them."
Impractical solution. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh sure, that will work for very low densities of information, but what about something the size of the Wikipedia? [wikipedia.org] That article states that the Wikipedia has over 2.4 billion words across over 4 million articles. The article has a nice visual image of what would happen if you took all that information and printed it into 1000 page encyclopedia volumes (each containing 8 million characters). It totals over 1800 print volumes.
Now, where are you going to find that much stone writing surface in one place, and how are you going to economically carve it in a reasonable lifetime, and how are you going to arrange it in a fashion that it's human readable/explorable?
Even reproducing something immensely valuable for a recovering industrial society like Machinery's Handbook [wikipedia.org] in stonework would take an immense amount of space, time, and money to do. Just something as simple as the Georgia Guidestones cost about $225,000 to do.
No, try again when you come up with something practical.
Re:simple: encyclopedias (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Star Trek did it (Score:2, Interesting)
So has anyone ever looked at cockroach DNA with a crypto algorithm on a supercomputer?
Re:This one gives an idea: (Score:3, Interesting)
You've got the ground here for an excellent adventure game also.
Start a la Civ - develop tech and tools to decipher the puzzles to get at the records, fight off the various hordes of whatever - zombies, Luddites, other religious fans, rivals. Access the goodies, learn how to read them, develop a base of stable resources to use the preserved writings to do some real re-building. And, is there a larger goal or need than just getting the hidden goodies?
It'd be interesting to see how high a tech level is needed to access the preserved info of higher tech levels. A more interesting question might be what kinds of economics might one have, starting relatively fresh, compared to the longer slog that's gotten us where we are now. Would there be mostly a replay of what's been done to get us where we are now, or might there be sufficiently useful alternate ways to consider value and exchange of labor and knowledge and artistry.
How far back might we get knocked? Alternately, should we be wiped out, could what we leave be in useful form to the next possible intelligent species? Sci-fi has some good stories of us finding stuff from alien dead civs; what if the roles are reversed?
And don't unnecessarily knock tax records and such; much of what we know of Babylon et al is from surviving inventories, tax records, and commentaries. It's kind of amazing what kinds of things can be deduced from what and how people counted things and made deals. Maybe there'd even be some real use for all the crap that the no-such people are stashing away.