The headline reminds me of an organization with a similar mission--
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."
This is a fun thought experiment. It usually comes up in the context of how would we rebuild if a war or some natural disaster threw civilization back into the Stone Age.
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.
From a technological point of view, the following book would be useful:
> 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…
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.
I agree with the topics chosen, but I fear a lot of this information couod be very hypothetical, like a wikipedia article does not enable you to reproduce the same results.
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.
> From a technological point of view, the following book would be useful:
>> 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.
The response to that is basically the same extremism that you read about in the Middle East and now more and more in the U.S. I mean, the guy paid for it with his own or his group's own money and it had harmless, if not both noble and naive, inscriptions on it, and people defaced it and then eventually blew it up in a terrorist act.
The references in the comments to germ theory and the bible make clear a more serious problem: once you've created such a manual, how do you get whoever it's aimed at to care? Why should they respect you as a source of knowledge and not someone within their civilization?
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.
Semi-related, but it seems like getting railroad transport would require good metals, so it couldn't really happen before it did in reality. But I wonder if something like telegraph or radio could exist with more primitive materials?
More important would be to preserve a very thorough and accurate recording of everything we’ve done so any future civilization could analyze it and determine what we did wrong and how to avoid it. More importantly though we should be working on solving the problems we have and making sure our current civilization doesn’t fail.
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.
I think so too. I don't think that preserving technological progress is as important as preserving history.
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.
A lot of comments disparaging this, but it is fundamentally correct.
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.
Except... we haven't failed? We're still around. Sure, there's imperfections and we know how to solve or prevent them from happening again - which is what should be preserved, rough edges and all. Like, "we tried democracy but these are the downsides and here's some situations where the imperfect system was abused", or "here is a super effective source of energy, but here's some situations where it went wrong and we irradiated large areas"
"we clearly failed" is catastrophising the current situation and is a defeatist attitude.
That's a good consideration, and any such document must display ample humility. Today, we could fill several volumes with "This is what we know we got wrong, this is how we might have avoided it."
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?
We know some things that we got wrong. We saw climate change coming, generations ahead. Could a time traveller change a damned thing? Probably not! Unless they had some brilliant tech, say,chemistry for excellent batteries and solar panels that could have been made with 50s tech -- that might have put us on a different trajectory altogether.
> Why would you want to create a manual when we clearly failed in current form?
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.
Defeating the failure of civilization entirely is a really high bar; the thing we're trying to prevent is failing faster and more painfully. This is like asking "Why would people who are going to die anyway bother having hospitals?"
If you read the article, it's basically what knowledge via books we would want to pass on if civilization was restarting. Hopefully that would mean we select to correct for our current failing for the hypothetical next civilization.
They should have titled this the Humanist manual for Civilization. The most significant influence in civilization is the Bible. This is worse than missing a solution. It is looking a problem, seeing the piece that fits the puzzle and looking away for another piece that never quite fits because they don't like what it means. It is voluntary, self-imposed blindness.
I find it curious that anyone can be so reductionist.
It reminds me of highschool, where, while waiting for a teacher to arrive, another student declared to me that they "knew the chemical formula for a human" and then just listed six or seven elements without any regard for (1) that's not what a chemical formula is, nor (2) a human isn't a single chemical, nor (3) all the other elements in a human body.
What you're listing (clearly inspired by the ten commandments) wasn't sufficient for Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, even though at least two of those rose to dominance within preexisting civilisations that had a whole bunch of extra rules.
Those other rules included things like "pork goes off really fast in a desert so just don't even risk it" and "when we said don't kill other people we weren't talking about those specific foreign soldiers currently waving their spears around" and "crop rotation is good".
More recent things that the linked story is talking about includes "how to help women give birth without dying".
She appeared quite serious, but this was the late 90s so it is entirely possible I've misremembered.
And it is also entirely possible that my teenage self simply didn't spot any attempted jokes on her part; as memories aren't like video recordings I can't play the event back with the awareness I have now.
"What you're listing (clearly inspired by the ten commandments) wasn't sufficient for Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, even though at least two of those rose to dominance within preexisting civilisations that had a whole bunch of extra rules."
If the shoe fits... "Judaism, Christianity, or Islam" ...all of the above didn't follow the ten commandments. The problem isn't in the list of rules. The ten commandments are very well formed and cover the greatest injustices that plague you, I and our interactions with fellow people. The problem is in the fallible people trying to keep the ten commandments.
So when we fail to keep a commandment of God do we pretend to be like God and change the rule or do we repentantly seek God's forgiveness for breaking the rule? Ultimately, the answer proves an individual's rescue or downfall.
If your rules only work for spherical frictionless humans in a vacuum, they don't work.
The ten commandments are not, and never were, sufficient for any organisation of people complex enough to deserve the title "civilisation" — at most "commune", "village" or "tribe", but not a whole civilisation.
That is where you are wrong. They are not my rules. They are commands of God to be obeyed. They are meant to be followed and to show one thing: That we cannot obey them perfectly. If we could, and history proves we can't, then we wouldn't need God. But we do need God and that is why he sent his son to redeem us from the eternal consequences, not the temporal consequences, of our failure to obey God's commandments. So by His grace the commandments are sufficient.
Civilization (the topic at hand) is temporal, but even if it was whatever it is you think the afterlife looks like, then both “and history proves we can't” and independently “by His grace” would be sufficient to show that particular set rules are not, in fact, sufficient.
(That grace thing though, it’s not even vaguely coherent as an argument for you. It is a “get out of jail free card”: anything which could do what you’re trying to argue divine Grace could do would obviate any need for Jesus, or the thing with Moses on the mountain, or the flood, or departure from the garden of Eden, and the existence of asexuals is a demonstration that the whole spiel from Jesus about “looking at a woman with lust is adultery” could just have been avoided by design).
Also, neither Jews nor Muslims regard Jesus as the son of God — the former regard Jesus as, IIRC, “that heretic”; and the latter, IIRC, as the second of the three prophets.
As a side note: I was slightly amused to realise that according to the Bible, “Then he [Jesus] ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” But hey, reading the NT is why I stopped being Christian.
> They are not my rules.
That’s nit picking, my use of that sentence is entirely valid regardless of who came up with the things.
Which version of the ten do you follow? The first commandment as given in Exodus (as compared to the slightly different phrasing later, but Exodus says this version is literally the word of God) is vague enough to allow polytheism just so long as “I who rescued you from slavery in Egypt” is put at the head of the table.
Of course, you don’t have to take the book literally — most Christians don’t (but then, parable of the sower), and some even consider literal interpretations to be blasphemous.
You do realize that many of the greatest scientific minds and advancements are from people that have a Christian religious background. Some that immediately come to mind are Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Leonhard Euler, Michael Faraday, Charles Barkla, George Washington Carver, Charles Babbage, and Samuel Morse. And many in that list believed they were better scientists because they followed Christ.
Also: Einstein, Feynman, Aristotle, all famously not Christian, and that's just off the top of my head and limited to Western culture.
A westerner not knowing Hasan Ibn al-Hatham, Zhang Heng, and Aryabhata is less surprising (I learned their names in the last 15 minutes), but I think one ought to at least look for counterexamples before asserting any particular culture to be "better" at a thing.
Not even that good at religion, given what additional stuff there is in the three[0] holy books containing those commandments.
[0] Arguably more holy books, but I don't feel like arguing if Mormonism is more different from the rest of Christianity than Islam, let alone the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Not as important if you are trying to bootstrap society. Hygiene is more important in dense populations already operating at several levels above scavenger.
Idk about your country, but we don't teach children "fear god or burn in hell" or "what would Jesus do", we tend to teach young children not to be dicks to each other and not to do dumb stuff. Most of our children books aren't based on some religious stuff either. They're quite neutral. Yes, there is "religious education" in school, but that's not the major focus of our educational system.
When i was in kindergarten, it was e.g. "Struwwelpeter"[1]. Nowadays, that's probably not considered child-friendly anymore...
Presumably it caused some kind of problem back then too, so that's why they put it in.
Also, it's bad for the guy who owns all the land in that sweet dank river valley near you[1] if the people who do the work on that land start to covet his things in particular.
The sudden super-clean vocal hits in this video are absolutely killing me, I don't know why it seems like the funniest damn thing all week, but it really does.
(I'm still watching to get to the part where your comment makes sense)
It is really to bad eucryphia's post was flagged. It is always nicer when we can have a free, and honest discussion without the nannies swatting at each of us when we don't fall into line. Perhaps the nannies "covet" the free thinkers of this world.
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."
https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-overview/