I like the direction that this author is going. He's certainly not the only person to be thinking along these lines. The Long Now Foundation in particular seems

I like the direction that this author is going. He's certainly not the only person to be thinking along these lines. The Long Now Foundation in particular seems to be invested in pursuing answers to some of the overarching questions posed by this column. One recent post on the Foundation's blog caught my eye: "Kevin Kelly’s Selected Books for the Manual for Civilization" (http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/18/kevin-kelly-books/ http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/18/kevin-kelly-books/), in which Kevin Kelly (author of Cool Tools) offers his additions to the Foundation's growing "corpus which could sustain or rebuild civilization."