We will need a true "civilization source code" reference for when we settle the stars, not just for apocalyptic scenarios. Like much source code, the most stab

We will need a true "civilization source code" reference for when we settle the stars, not just for apocalyptic scenarios. Like much source code, the most stable pieces for our own civilization is gradually lost to the mists of time, and we end up with mostly binary executable-only code. Generally where you will find this is in scaling down of processes. Thought experiment. You start out with the minimum viable population to simply keep current technological civilization [1]. They are tasked with one task, and one task only for the rest of their lives before an asteroid too big to divert hits in 100 years: document what would it take for someone to do what they do today, because we only have space for 10K people on a space habitat that we can build in that time. How do you go about building the reboot manual then? You will rapidly find that the fractal nature of knowledge exists in the past as well. There is a tendency today to depict our ancestors as simpletons, but this is a fatal conceit. They may not have had the scale that we do today, but they knew a lot of processes and observations that worked for the scale they did possess, and many times we've lost that knowledge as we never have had to revisit that scale for nigh on generations now in some endeavors. Part of the enormously difficult task of booting/rebooting technological civilization is simply identifying the lower-bound you want to start from, which defines the scale to start at, and re-capturing the internalized knowledge that worked at that scale but is uneconomic to pursue at our much larger industrial scales today. If you like this area of knowledge archeology, there is actually quite a bit out there, but you have to look off the beaten path, and "back-port" what we know today to what was practiced back then to "patch over" misunderstandings back then. In some areas like organic chemistry and radiological materials, such misunderstandings misapplied would be fatal. Not a big deal when you have a huge population base and plenty of other people who will learn from the mistake and carry on the species' push into the knowledge frontier. But much more significant if you have a narrow population base and only one or two specialists representing what used to be maybe hundreds of people in a specialty field in the distant past. An example that is fairly-cleaned up in a highly narrow specialty is David Gingery's series on building a rudimentary machine shop from just scrap metal and charcoal [2]. You would have to look elsewhere for information on how to mine metal, smelt it, etc., how to make charcoal, and how to make progressively more accurate and precise machine tools given a starting point of what we consider today would be quite inaccurate and imprecise tools, but it gives you a taste of what's in store for truly rebooting civilization. Even just to get us back to the 1930-40's level era technology would require a minimally viable trained, knowledgeable population base in the tens of millions I would guess. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... [2] http://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrapSeries.html http://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrapSeries....