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Ask HN: Catastrophe happens, What would happen to all of the world's knowledge?

9 points by anonmamwsm ↗ HN
Let's say that for some reason or another, a catastrophic event happened where we had no more access to the internet, essential resources, and a good chunk of humanity was wiped out.

What would to all of humanity's knowledge, how hard would it be to build back society?

If there are people building rockets to make our species multi-planetary in case something goes horribly wrong, we should protect our knowledge if that same scenario happens.

I mean, something like a bunch of bunkers all over the world with offline data centers storing most of our knowledge. Is there something like that that exists?

12 comments

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p-e-w
People overestimate the importance of the Internet, and computer systems in general, for storing knowledge. Most of humanity's knowledge, and all of the critical knowledge, is stored in books. Many of those are printed on acid-free paper, which is well-known to survive centuries with essentially zero maintenance.

As long as people don't forget how to read, it's mostly a matter of repopulating the Earth and using libraries as a knowledge base. Even if the knowledge stored in the brains of all surviving humans was somehow wiped out, this should get us back to roughly the start of the 20th century in a relatively short time, and from that point on we can simply expect history to repeat itself (hopefully, without the "catastrophe" though).

anonmamwsm
I understand, so we'll have that at least. But if we have a chance to optimize that process, why just rely on books, I feel like that won't be the most efficient way of distributing knowledge if we had to. Even if we can get up to the 20th century, why not get up to whatever we were at rather than having to redo some work.

I'm just saying that if we rely on book literatures, we're missing out on the most efficient and powerful source of knowledge, the internet.

watercooler_guy
If within those books there is knowledge/instructions on semiconductor manufacture and computer networking, then we could rebuild the internet with relative ease and re-disseminate our books at that time.

I vaguely recall someone or some group compiling instructions for 8-bit CPU chip manufacture in case of a worldwide catastrophe. Google isn't finding anything, but maybe someone else knows what I'm talking about?

tacostakohashi
> we're missing out on the most efficient and powerful source of knowledge, the internet.

The premise if your question was that "we had no more access to the internet", so of course we're missing out on the internet as a simple matter of definition.

anonmamwsm
that's why I'm talking about making a backup that can be accessed offline
sloaken
There are people working on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Mission_Foundation

Of course it assumes a minimal skill to be able to extract the data.

So if society goes into the dark ages again, we would have to rely on books until society had developed the technology to read the media left behind.

beardyw
I think it is important to remember that people and their knowledge and skills are critical. Given even perfect retention of written knowledge, you would need a massive learning program, maybe over generations.

Since we are only talking about maybe 50 years of knowledge lost (the rest being in books), getting people to a point of being proficient would take much longer than than that. So starting again doesn't look so bad.

taubek
One of the roles of the libraries is preservation of knowledge. The problem that comes to my mind is the fact that there is a great amount of knowledge available only on non-paper media and you would need some kind of device to access them.

Even the old newspaper editions are either digitized or saved on microfiche films.

There is also a question of what does it mean to rebuild society? Get it to which stage? Bronze age, medieval times, time od space travels? Imagen if catastrophe was a masive EMP that would kill all of the electronic devices at once and that you have one simple task: bring fresh water to people. You can either start with building aqueducts (like old Romans did) or you could try to build pumps that run on wind power. How long would it take to create one single engine that is powered by electricity?

logicalmonster
> One of the roles of the libraries is preservation of knowledge.

Don't many libraries use analytics to determine which types of books are popular and which books aren't borrowed often enough to justify what gets put on the shelves? Aren't their shelves filling up with lots of timely pop-culture rather than timeless knowledge?

cblconfederate
surprisingly little of value exists only in digital form. I can t think of a theorem that is not printer somewhere