by admin | February 11th, 2010
It troubles me to think that a massive EMP event or a power outage could lead to the demolition and irrevocable destruction of human knowledge with one exception. I would shed no tears for the destruction of all federal tax records in these united States. I have posted several scribblings about the importance of books to our legacy and our capability to rise from the ashes that ALL political systems doom us to. I have made mention of the Dan Forrester Memorial Library and include Lindsey’s Technical Books in my links menu. Both invaluable resources. You have no idea how many orphaned books are making their way into landfills to make room for the video libraries the government libraries have become. Take the time to build your own private library of your favorite tomes and add some that may help you survive the coming cataclysm. Pennies on the dollars for encyclopedias on Craigslist or Ebay. -BB
“IN MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away. In month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible.”
What’s remarkable about these observations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London.
We, of course, have knowledge undreamt of by the Babylonians. We don’t just peek at Venus from afar, we have sent spacecraft there. Our astronomers now observe planets round alien suns and peer across vast chasms of space and time, back to the beginning of the universe itself. Our industrialists are transforming sand and oil into ever smaller and more intricate machines, a form of alchemy more wondrous than anything any alchemist ever dreamed of. Our biologists are tinkering with the very recipes for life itself, gaining powers once attributed to gods.
Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?
Of course, in the event of a disaster big enough to wipe out all humans, such as a colossal asteroid strike, it would not really matter. Even if another intelligent species evolved on Earth, almost all traces of humanity would have vanished long before.
Let’s suppose, however, that something less cataclysmic occurs, that many buildings remain intact and enough people survive to rebuild civilisation after a few decades or centuries. Suppose, for instance, that the global financial system collapses, or a new virus kills most of the world’s population, or a solar storm destroys the power grid in North AmericaMovie Camera. Or suppose there is a slow decline as soaring energy costs and worsening environmental disasters take their toll. The increasing complexity and interdependency of society is making civilisation ever more vulnerable to such events (New Scientist, 5 April 2008, p 28 and p 32).
Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity’s knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?
Read the rest:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.300-digital-doomsday-the-end-of-knowledge.html