6 ms·
How Can We Create a Manual for Civilization? (2017)
- eucryphia 4y ago
- codefreeordie 4y agoit turns out that whole "don't covet" thing is going to be our downfall
- freedude 4y agoIt 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.
- codefreeordie 4y agoI think that one is mostly a fight over #1 and #2 (which eucryphia didn't include in their list)
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoPresumably 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. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs https://youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs
- codefreeordie 4y agoThe 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)
- hulitu 4y ago> We've already got one: ARTHUR: What? GALAHAD: He says they've already got one! ARTHUR: Are you sure he's got one? FRENCH GUARD: Oh, yes. It's very nice-a. (I told him we already got one.) FRENCH GUARDS: [chuckling] ARTHUR: Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look? FRENCH GUARD: Of course not! You are English types-a! ARTHUR: Well, what are you, then? FRENCH GUARD: I'm French! Why do think I have this outrageous accent, you silly king-a?! GALAHAD: What are you doing in England? FRENCH GUARD: Mind your own business!
- BurningPenguin 4y agoSimilar rules existed long before that. Humans aren't that dumb.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway1492 4y agoClearly humans are that dumb.
- ticviking 4y agoBut this is the ruleset that western civilization choose to have its young children memorize as a first set of rules to learn
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoOnly a relatively small percentage these days, secular education is more and more the norm these days.
- BurningPenguin 4y agoIdk 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... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
- giantg2 4y agoIt seems we are that dumb if we had to make these sorts of rules and iterate on them but we still break them thousands of years later.
- 4y ago
- ben_w 4y agoI 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".
- freedude 4y ago"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." Because they didn't follow them...
- ben_w 4y agoWhich claim are you attaching the “because” (and, I think equivalently, “they”) to? I ask because I can’t see how that response fits on to any part of that quote.
- freedude 4y agoIf 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.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoexcept that the "experts" can't agree on things either.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoWash your hands? Separate pooping water from drinking water. Respect for sanitation and medicine?
- peteradio 4y agoNot as important if you are trying to bootstrap society. Hygiene is more important in dense populations already operating at several levels above scavenger.
- pc86 4y agoThe GP is paraphrasing the 10 Commandments as a "Manual for Civilization," I can't imagine respect for medicine/science is high on their list.
- freedude 4y agoYou 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.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoGiordano Bruno, philosopher and scientist, burnt at the stake 400 years ago
- ben_w 4y agoAlso: 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- freedude 4y agoThey 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.
- noSyncCloud 4y agoWhat an incredibly chauvinistic and Euro-centric take.
- freedude 4y agoYours is one intolerant viewpoint. Regardless, since 16th century or so what is good in western civilization has been promoted by Christian belief.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoWe could, it would be very politically incorrect therefore we can't.
- 082349872349872 4y agoWhat is politically incorrect about saying: To get a civilization, you will need to have 10s to 100s of thousands of people living in close proximity? (along with, presumably, some more detailed tips as to how one tackles the various problems arising on the way to that goal...)
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThere's a lot of things in your comment that you're leaving unsaid; please, elaborate.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoI’m afraid I can’t.
- twoxproblematic 4y ago[dead]
- lvl102 4y agoWhy would you want to create a manual when we clearly failed in current form?
- klyrs 4y agoThat'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?
- andrewla 4y agoDo we, though, know what we got 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? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638385
- klyrs 4y agoWe 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.
- throw0101a 4y ago> 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.
- towaway15463 4y agoMore 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI 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.
- throw0101a 4y agoFrom 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… * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/buy-the-book/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/buy-the-book/ Along with the books in its bibliography: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ 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. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease A book on anatomy would be useful too so we don't have to rediscover what various bits and pieces and parts do.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoI 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.
- tablespoon 4y ago> 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.
- lake_vincent 4y agoFound em: https://archive.org/details/civ-vi-25-th-online-manual-eng https://archive.org/details/civ-vi-25-th-online-manual-eng (Just kidding, don't hurt me)
- failrate 4y agoManga copies of Dr. Stone?
- bombcar 4y agoWhatever you do don’t put them on giant concrete pillars in the middle of a field somewhere.
- pjc50 4y agoThe 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.
- freedude 4y ago"how do you get whoever it's aimed at to care?" When there is an emptiness inside that must be filled. What do you fill it with?
- hellohowareu 4y agoThe 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." https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-overview/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-overview/
- cjameskeller 4y agoMuch respect for this org and its founder. They are also doing great work with their "Seed Eco Home" project: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Seed_Home_v2 https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Seed_Home_v2
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 4y agoThis 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.
- urwhatuknow 4y ago
- maliker 4y agoSomeone tried to do a bullet point version but it got blown up recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
- bmitc 4y agoThe 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.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoSeveral parts to civilization: culture, environment, people. Hard to nail any of them down up front. Anyway, who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilization? Presuming ours(?) failed and the manual is needed.
- emptyparadise 4y agoSemi-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?