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 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.