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Wikipedia. Put onto a device with a nonmechanical hard drive using technology that will last for at least 1,000 years. Said device would have to be powered with

by hooande 12y ago

Wikipedia. Put onto a device with a nonmechanical hard drive using technology that will last for at least 1,000 years. Said device would have to be powered with kinetic energy so that someone could press a pump with their hand or foot to give it power. I would imagine that the hardware could be made less complex and more durable by stripping it down to perform only the purpose of displaying text on a screen. We should develop and perfect this technology and scatter it around the world. I can't think of anything that's more useful than all of the world's knowledge in a small box. The science, research and technology articles alone could turn men into gods of their time, imparting the knowledge necessary to wage war or enthrall most people. Can you imagine if modern wikipedia were dropped off anywhere in the world 1,000 years ago? The world would be completely different. Plus we'd be able to transmit so much of global culture, in different languages no less. If society was completely reset they would still have a knowledge of breaking bad and mash, plus all of the classics of today. Preserving wikipedia for centuries has to be one of the most beneficial things we can do for future societies, no matter what happens. Specifically about this book, I heard a radio interview where the author said that the technology he felt was most important is the lathe. It's like the ycombinator of tools, you can use a partially completed lathe to make another lathe. He mentioned a story about a machinist who was able to start with one lathe and raw materials, and end up with an entire shop full of different tools. I almost went out and bought a cheap lathe, just the zombie apocalypse starts anytime soon.

redler 12y ago
I think it would be particularly useful to include change history and discussion pages. The struggle of how we arrived at this apparent consensus, and the evidence that it was just a snapshot of a (mysteriously and suddenly stilled?) roiling river of debate, could be nearly as valuable as the facts themselves.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  I doubt it. How important would the heavily debated subjects be to a post-apocalyptic society? I'd imagine they would care much more about husbandry, carpentry, metallurgy, and primitive industrial chemistry than whether or not X person was notable enough to deserve a page or precisely how long Colbert managed to keep the page about the extinct elephant altered.
  - EliRivers 12y ago
    Whilst I don't disagree with your point, I recall that for an enormously long time so much weight was put into the works of ancient Greeks that we literally missed the evidence of our own senses[1]. An understanding on the part of our hypothetical post-apocalypse recovery that the knowledge of their ancestors, whilst enormously useful, is not an absolute and is open to correction, would help them avoid making that mistake themselves. Sure, perhaps not the history of a page on something trivial, but something to keep the knowledge of the ancients being seen as immutable. [1] The example I can't find, so I can't be sure I remember this correctly, but an ancient Greek writer described an insect as having a number of legs that it quite clearly didn't, and wasn't corrected for a long, long time.
tokenadult 12y ago
Wikipedia. Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies. The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read? I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Preposterous_genetic_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Pre...
- hyp0 12y ago
  The obvious solution here is a reboot civilization wiki. There could even be fun discussions about what to put first, the assumed technological level of the target audience, etc. I think many people would find this extremely engaging... if there was an initial thing in place, with some aspects right, but, more importantly, some aspects wrong, to criticize...
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
srl 12y ago
Have you ever tried learning math, or physics, from wikipedia? It's nearly impossible. I agree that preserving some sort of encyclopedic form of knowledge is a great idea, and that wikipedia is the best we have at the moment, but in the event of apocalypse, it would be pretty much useless. Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia. Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.
- jbinto 12y ago
  I agree Wikipedia isn't great for approaching new topics. Have you heard of Simple English Wikipedia? It does describe (e.g.) electricity in a useful way. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity
- outworlder 12y ago
  Not useless, however. Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering. Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them. Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered. WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks. I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there. There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing. Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars. Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.
sytelus 12y ago
If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equations. But Wikipedia is extremely shallow. A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise. But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages. I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.
masklinn 12y ago
> Wikipedia Is way too big and does not actually contain most of the information which would be useful in such a scenario.

by hooande 12y ago

redler 12y ago

I think it would be particularly useful to include change history and discussion pages. The struggle of how we arrived at this apparent consensus, and the evidence that it was just a snapshot of a (mysteriously and suddenly stilled?) roiling river of debate, could be nearly as valuable as the facts themselves.

jjoonathan 12y ago
I doubt it. How important would the heavily debated subjects be to a post-apocalyptic society? I'd imagine they would care much more about husbandry, carpentry, metallurgy, and primitive industrial chemistry than whether or not X person was notable enough to deserve a page or precisely how long Colbert managed to keep the page about the extinct elephant altered.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  Whilst I don't disagree with your point, I recall that for an enormously long time so much weight was put into the works of ancient Greeks that we literally missed the evidence of our own senses[1]. An understanding on the part of our hypothetical post-apocalypse recovery that the knowledge of their ancestors, whilst enormously useful, is not an absolute and is open to correction, would help them avoid making that mistake themselves. Sure, perhaps not the history of a page on something trivial, but something to keep the knowledge of the ancients being seen as immutable. [1] The example I can't find, so I can't be sure I remember this correctly, but an ancient Greek writer described an insect as having a number of legs that it quite clearly didn't, and wasn't corrected for a long, long time.

tokenadult 12y ago

Wikipedia. Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies. The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read? I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Preposterous_genetic_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Pre...

hyp0 12y ago
The obvious solution here is a reboot civilization wiki. There could even be fun discussions about what to put first, the assumed technological level of the target audience, etc. I think many people would find this extremely engaging... if there was an initial thing in place, with some aspects right, but, more importantly, some aspects wrong, to criticize...
- spiritplumber 12y ago

srl 12y ago

Have you ever tried learning math, or physics, from wikipedia? It's nearly impossible. I agree that preserving some sort of encyclopedic form of knowledge is a great idea, and that wikipedia is the best we have at the moment, but in the event of apocalypse, it would be pretty much useless. Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia. Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.

jbinto 12y ago
I agree Wikipedia isn't great for approaching new topics. Have you heard of Simple English Wikipedia? It does describe (e.g.) electricity in a useful way. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity
outworlder 12y ago
Not useless, however. Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering. Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them. Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered. WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks. I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there. There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing. Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars. Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.

sytelus 12y ago

If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equations. But Wikipedia is extremely shallow. A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise. But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages. I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.

masklinn 12y ago

> Wikipedia Is way too big and does not actually contain most of the information which would be useful in such a scenario.