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What Is the One Fact Humanity Needs to Know?
- Shorel 11y agoI have made two Foundations. The other one is at the other side of the world... (assuming civilization is not destroyed at once but in slow phases)
- maxharris 11y agoTo obtain the knowledge you need to survive and thrive, there is no alternative to reason and the five senses.
- api 11y agoMy first thought was electricity -- spinning magnets generating fields that power things. My second was the Haber process, a simple reaction that produces fixed nitrogen. With that a simple agricultural society could escape subsistence.
- Numberwang 11y agoGenerally the answers are rather weak. Dr Samuel Godfrey I think did the best job. Also, I wonder what a very religious scientist would answer.
- cryoshon 11y agoYou will be very hard pressed to find religious scientists that are reputable.
- fivethreetwo 11y agoYeah. What did Newton ever do for science?
- savanaly 11y agoI think he meant today. Aren't like >90% of scientists in the hard sciences atheists or at least non-religious? Of course there are thousands of counterexamples, but by "hard to find" I think he meant if you went down to the local uni you might not find anyone at all.
- schoen 11y agoMost scientists in the U.S. are nonreligious, or less religious than the general population around them, but the original commenter said you would be "very hard pressed" to find a counterexample who's a reputable scientist. Surely "very hard pressed" should mean it's actually difficult to do so.
- schoen 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins
- 3pt14159 11y agoCharles Foster or Donald Knuth both come to mind. Multiple studies put the religious attendance of scientists at around 15 to 20% with belief in a high power or god at around 40 to 50%.
- smoser 11y agoThis list from Wikipedia claims otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_Nobel_laureates_by_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_Nobel_laurea...
- schoen 11y agoBe careful using those lists to show that people on them are "religious"; the articles' notes themselves quote laureate Orhan Pamuk (on the list of Muslim laureates) as saying "I do not believe in a personal connection to God" and James Gleick as saying that laureate Richard Feynman (on the list of Jewish laureates) was "distinctly uninterested in either the faith or sociology of Judaism". You can also follow random Wikipedia article links and find, for example, laureate Joseph Rotblat saying "I am not a particularly religious person, and this is the reason for my agnosticism".
- wespad 11y agoGeorges Lemaître: Priest & Scientist; Father of the Big Bang Theory; He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre
- jerf 11y agoRelated to a couple of answers, but I'd still sharpen it to: "Humans naturally seek reasons why they are right, but to understand the universe, you must seek reasons why you are wrong." From that one insight, the entire rest of the scientific method flows; from there, science itself, and math, and pretty much the ~10 answers that didn't include this idea in it.
- ggchappell 11y ago> Humans naturally seek reasons why they are right, but to understand the universe, you must seek reasons why you are wrong. Fantastic! Is that original?
- kordless 11y agoBuddhism's eightfold path puts you to finding internal dissonance and resolving it, so I'd say it's similar from a philosophical viewpoint. The quote jerf makes is quite succinct, however. A good one to remember and repeat often.
- jerf 11y agoIt very obviously is the result of many other ideas, and I won't deny that. However, I have not seen this particular focus sharpened down to this brevity anywhere else. It came from a slightly different source for me, but a similar one. Imagine you're thrust back in time 200-400 years, and let's just stick you in England or something where you've got a University and a willing audience to learn. How do you transfer as much knowledge as possible, as quickly as possible? Well, as much as I think the Prime Directive of Star Trek is a bit of a crock as a moral principle [1], as a descriptive principle we can see there's some truth to it today, if we look around with open eyes... simply transferring knowledge without transferring the ability to develop it yourself, or, if you prefer, transferring wisdom, is a dangerous thing to do, and tends not to produce lasting results. So I asked myself what my thesis would be, what's something short and simple that I would repeatedly hammer on? And that's what I came up with. I would also do that thing that some of the best teachers do, where they tell you "I'm going to deliberately screw up derivations in class, it's on you to catch them", to try to avoid being treated as personally reliable myself. (The "Dark Ages" are widely misunderstood and were not the barren wasteland of knowledge advancement the popular conception has of it, but I do think you could make a good case that they were indeed slowed down by over-privileging Aristotle and the other such classical authors for too long.) [1]: Specifically, it leaves a rich space of options between "completely leaving the society in poverty to their own devices" and "just blunder in and start selling tech with wild abandon" completely unexplored. It's a great dramatic device, I really have no problem with it within the show itself, but it doesn't travel out of that context well.
- rayalez 11y ago‘Spin a magnet inside a loop of copper and the form of energy you create can provide you with light, heat, food and clean water.’ is my favorite. And the ones about scientific method of course(but I think there should be a way to put it more eloquently and concisely).
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI liked that one too, but could just leave them a statue with only the legs remaining and a poem :-) Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! indeed.
- DougMerritt 11y agoI love that poem. :)
- Ygor 11y agoI'm surprised no one mentioned the source of cataclysm itself. The fact that there was a civilization and despite all its advanced knowledge - it is now gone. This would be especially important if Cataclysm was man-made.
- glhaynes 11y agoUnless the cataclysm was a side effect of the consumption of the easily-accessible fossil fuels. If humanity had to restart its technological progression today with most easily-accessible fossil fuels already used up, it might find it much more difficult to progress past about where we were in the nineteenth century. http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels/ http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisat...
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoOr they'd just move directly to electrics. Some early cars were electric. The range and power wasn't impressive, but it worked. Wind power becomes pretty obvious at that point as well. Tie a fan to a generator, and voila, free-ish energy. With no oil, people will just deal with the limitations of low wattage electrics until they get better battery and generation tech. Arguably, you could have a 19th century type society with a nuclear reactor; both uranium and graphite can be mined with simple tools.
- Retra 11y agoIf the cataclysm happened in a way that we can easily predict, it would not be that valuable of information. It would be like a dead person coming back to warn you that car crashes can kill people.
- joesmo 11y ago"Gods, spirits, ghosts, and all the other stuff you think exists do not exist."
- mmphosis 11y agoNot only does God play dice but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
- joesmo 11y agoWTF does that mean?
- Shorel 11y agoIt's a quote by a physicist about quantum mechanics defending the Copenhagen (many universes) interpretation. Because Einstein said: 'God does not play dice', he wanted to express that just because there's a probability of measuring something doesn't mean reality itself is built upon probabilities.
- tezza 11y agoWe never have all the answers.
- aruggirello 11y agoSo the best scientists in the world were asked “If civilisation was destroyed, what scientific information would you pass on to the survivors?” - And all they could come up with was basically, choose the most precious bits of information that would hopefully allow the survivors to restore our great civilisation (and possibly repeat our mistakes)? IMHO “If civilisation was destroyed,” given current environmental status (exhausting resources, pollution, rising sea levels and temperatures, almost 75% of species gone extinct in the last century), as well as our unsustainable economy, corrupted political leaders, and proliferated nuclear weapons (still) powerful enough to fully obliterate mankind (if not the whole of life on Earth), it would most likely be due to ourselves. So the best bits of information I would pass on to survivors would be those that would allow them not to repeat our mistakes: "take care of the environment, and don't make war to each other; do this with the utmost diligence - keep in mind it's a really tough job; so tough in fact, that we failed, and all of our advanced technology, with all of our wisdom, wasn't enough to prevent our collapse." Edit: I understand my answer is perhaps OT (in the sense that it's not scientific information) but nevertheless if we want to maximise the survivors' chances...to survive, I would rather ensure they do not make our mistakes; because if we assume they'd have their own history and evolution (as a civilisation), just like we did, then we might assume as well, that they would make mostly similar discoveries, so there's no point in telling them in advance what they are going (sooner or later) to find out by themselves anyway.
- tw04 11y agoI think you missed the most important one. Each couple should have no more than X children. Half the reason we have what we have today is fighting over finite natural resources. You eliminate the pressure of overpopulation, you eliminate a massive reason to fight in the first place.
- schoen 11y agoI read someone's demographic observation that children are an asset in rural areas and a liability in urban areas. It's not clear that you could easily convince small-scale rural farmers in an area that wasn't affected by human population pressures that having lots of kids was a bad idea for the future. (At best, they might say "OK, when there are so many people that they're crammed together in cities, maybe it will be possible for the people of the future to want to have smaller families".)
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoI'm going to say basic germ theory. Suddenly, you can safely go about in the world as opposed to constantly getting sick via the simple act of washing up. Didn't washing up before delivering babies greatly lower infant mortality? Boiling water/treating sewage make everyone healthier? Not to mention, the benefits of washing out wounds to avoid infection. As a free bonus, this stuff automatically gives you an idea of microbes which should lead to lenses, microscope, telescopes, and, ideally, another scientific enlightenment.
- schoen 11y agoI read somewhere that immune responses (and pathogen virulence and reproduction rates) can be erratic enough that you can easy do small experiments that seem to disprove particular routes of contagion of particular diseases. Experiments with proper sample sizes and controls will probably work, but I wonder if some societies would reject the germ theory as disproven by experience or even experiment. It's also hard to get proper experimental controls, especially without modern technology and sanitation. And the process of empirically proving the relationship between specific pathogens and diseases is complicated! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch's_postulates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch's_postulates So I guess my concern is that people could have a lot of seemingly compelling experiences that might make them reject the germ theory (or think it was only applicable to a minority of infectious diseases), even after having been told about it in detail.
- Houshalter 11y agoThis is relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/ >Imagine that Archimedes invented a temporal telephone ("chronophone" for short) which lets him talk to you, here in the 21st century... > If you say something that is considered obvious in your home culture, it comes out of the chronophone as something that is considered obvious in Archimedes's culture... >if you say "The Earth circles the Sun" it comes out of the chronophone as "The Sun circles the Earth". It doesn't matter that our civilization is right and their civilization is wrong - the chronophone takes no notice of facts, only beliefs and cognitive strategies. You tried to transmit your own belief about heavenly mechanics, so it comes out as Archimedes's belief about heavenly mechanics.
- pasbesoin 11y agoTANSTAAFL P.S. Ok, I see now that the context is science and reconstructing civilization. Perhaps the acronym is a bit less pertinent, then. Perhaps not. Even in scientific and technical fields, I see too much attitude and salesmanship that disregards it, to the detriment of those who blindly buy in to the pitch. TANSTAAFL -- even if you're very bright.
- tpeo 11y agoThere ain't no such a thing as talking people out of a free lunch. Or I don't think so, at least. Even the best of us fall for it.
- JauntTrooper 11y ago"All these worlds are yours except Europa - attempt no landing there."
- charlieflowers 11y agoNice. And ... go dig around those old pyramids....
- erostrate 11y agoMy first thought was the same as number 3, the scientific method. But looking at history, many important discoveries were made long before the scientific method was formalised. It seems some weak, intuitive form of the scientific method came naturally to many people throughout history. So I would rather go with something that took a very long time to be understood and was absolutely necessary to create any civilization. For example number 4, basic hygiene. Or agriculture: "you can grow edible plants on purpose by planting their seeds in the ground and watering them". The scientific method is not very useful if you have to spend your life hunting and gathering to survive.
- Someone 11y ago"Illness is often caused by tiny lifeforms, invisible to the naked eye" I think this is the most important thing to learn, because it would spare the future from a lot of suffering and give future people leisure time to think about the world and discover things for themselves. However, I don't like that this is a bit of knowledge that doesn't easily allow humans to verify it. Instead, I would tell them that one can see many tiny things some of which make us ill, but not the tiniest of them, by staring through a tiny water droplet. Item #2 would, I think, be a statement on the periodic table that can easily be verified using minimal technology, again with a hint that there are even smaller things.
- kordless 11y agoAll this is a dream. - Michael Faraday
- vixen99 11y agoContent aside, this is presentation suited for a pre-teen.