25 ms·

People overestimate the importance of the Internet, and computer systems in general, for storing knowledge. Most of humanity's knowledge, and all of the critica

by p-e-w 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- tacostakohashi 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    that's why I'm talking about making a backup that can be accessed offline
- watercooler_guy 5y ago
  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?

by p-e-w 5y ago

anonmamwsm 5y ago

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.

tacostakohashi 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  that's why I'm talking about making a backup that can be accessed offline
watercooler_guy 5y ago
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?