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Greetings, Children of the New World!

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Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:35 / 16.01.06

Read this and this.

So, it's Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' time again. What information do you think would be most useful to store in the hopes of helping our descendents rebuild civilisation?

Obviously my first suggestion would be some information on what global warming is and how it works...

13:16 / 16.01.06

I would have thought everything should be included. The question is rather how should everything be presented so that it will be recognised as being of great value and worthy of preservation by just about anyone who might find it, and how do we make it as accessible as possible. There should obviously be millions of copies hidden all over the place too.

On the other hand I'm not really sure what he's talking about. We could nearly all die without necessarily loosing civilization, if we just do it right, and I suspect he got carried away with an analogy between us and more typical endangered species. At least that's what this talk of "the few breeding pairs of people that survive" leads me to imagine. I've no doubt he's right about billions dying (en masse) before the end of the century however, and that it will take a very long time for the world to recover.

16:56 / 16.01.06

I think we'd better start building a secret dome city at the north pole - and maybe planting lots of trees.

18:12 / 16.01.06

"HEY MAN YOU CRAZY OR SOMETHING?! LOOK WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME WE STARTED!" thanks to Bob Dylan's 'Talking World War Three Blues' for that line

03:12 / 17.01.06

Sometimes I'm with Quantum and Dylan. Sometimes I think we could have avoided these problems if long term capital gains had been defined as over thirty years, and short term ones were taxed at 95%.

09:25 / 17.01.06

What information do you think would be most useful to store in the hopes of helping our descendents rebuild civilisation?

What you can eat and what you can't. How to grow stuff. How to harvest it. How to store it and make it edible. What grows best in which environment. (Hmm, not much soil at the poles... is hydroponics possible without plastics?) Fertiliser - how to make efficient use of animal dung. How to deal with pests and parasites. How to catch fish. How to keep sheep and goats alive. How to breed them. How to milk them. How to make clothes out of them. How to grow trees. Carpentry with basic tools. Yeesh....how to sharpen flint? D'oh! How to make fire! How to make rope.

We need Ray Mears. Lots of Ray Mears.

10:39 / 17.01.06

A package designed to educate Humanity Resurgent on microbiology, medical science, and disease control. Education on the production of vaccines, insulin, antibiotics. The importance of sterilisation (of surgical equipment, not people).

Oh, and birth control. Try and slow down the inevitable growth of Humanity back up to world-threatening levels.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

10:47 / 17.01.06

I don't think things like how to make shelters/fire, or what can't be eaten are too important. I have no idea how people found that stuf out in the first place, but it seems the sort of thing that could be found out easily be experimentation.

I think it's important to look at stuff that was discovered by chance, or by leaps of genius. Maybe stuff that required years of very careful science as well.

I'm thinking about micro-biology (antiseptics, sterilisation and disease), Newtonian mechanics, genetics and inheritance, electricity and magnetism and some chemistry like the periodic table, composition of the air and respiration. Also, advice about past scientific dead-ends like the non-existent ether. Basically non-obvious science which has taken us hundreds of years to accumulate would accelerate progress if it were found after an apocalyptic event.

11:48 / 17.01.06

"I don't think things like how to make shelters/fire, or what can't be eaten are too important. I have no idea how people found that stuf out in the first place, but it seems the sort of thing that could be found out easily be experimentation."

If you're down to "a few breeding pairs" then I reckon you're not going to want to waste time and lives finding such things out by accident or experimentation. To get civilization going again you want a decent sized population and getting a stable food supply sorted is going to be fundamental to achieving that.

Mind you, what *would* grow or live on a big hot slab of rock? The time to start experimenting is probably now.

12:33 / 17.01.06

Is this the place to discuss opinions on the article itself or should we start a new thread? Am I the only one who thinks he's a bit pessimistic to think that global warming will reduce the earth's population to a few breeding pairs scraping a living in the arctic?

12:41 / 17.01.06

Am I the only one who thinks he's a bit pessimistic to think that global warming will reduce the earth's population to a few breeding pairs scraping a living in the arctic?

Agreed.

Tryphena Absent

21:49 / 17.01.06

I think the apocalyptic stuff probably rests on the idea that when the sea rises the power stations get flooded and power lines are washed away thus we won't have any electricity. This suggests to me that micro-generation is the way to go. The bit about viruses etc. seemed a little far fetched though.

In truth I'm not sure that Lovelock really believes it has gone too far but what better way to put pressure on the governments of the world then a prominent scientist saying it has? It's clear that they're not actually doing anything about climate change. Kyoto, potential plans to build power stations, none of these things are being properly enacted I suspect Lovelock's had enough of their utter and complete stupidity in response to basic fact and he's decided scaremongering is the only avenue left open to the scientific community. It would be in all our interests if they all sagely nodded their heads in response to this.

23:25 / 17.01.06

I think the point is that if we wait until things start to go horribly wrong it'll be far too late. If he starts telling people they are killing the next generation, their own kids, maybe something will be done.
If the top scientist in the field is informing the government we're all doomed perhaps some smart new kid just in the door will pull out all the stops and turn things around just in the nick of time. I'm seeing Brendan Fraser as the new kid, perhaps Morgan Freeman as Lovelock and Bill Pullman as Prime Minister.

Aside from all that a couple of those <$100 Laptops would help things along I should think. A new civilization rising from the ashes with wi-fi, tetris, excel(to organise the new civilisation) and perhaps MSN messenger should do just nicely.

It might be worthwile leaving a few copies of Gaia lying around, just in case.

I was kinda hoping the long awaited ice age might hit just at the right time to cancel all this shit out and keep the status quo.

08:31 / 18.01.06

Kind of hard for an ice age to form when the planet's heating up. I would have thought.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

09:19 / 18.01.06

Kind of hard for an ice age to form when the planet's heating up. I would have thought.

The idea is that the Gulf stream is shut down by cold water from the ice caps, so hot water from the tropics stays where it is. This means Europe and North America becoming colder, and icing over, even if maybe on average the planet is hotter because of global warming.

10:13 / 18.01.06

Kind of hard for an ice age to form when the planet's heating up. I would have thought.

Possibly not. There were increases in temperature, especially sea temperature, just prior to the last ice-age. One theory goes along the lines of:

Incresed temperature leads to an increase in evaporation from the seas. This causes massive cloud cover and general breakdown of weather systems that leads us nicely into the ice age.

It's surley not inconceivable that the planet could heat up a few degrees before freezing over. Considering Lovelocks earth being a giant homeostat you would think it may sway either way before going horribly wrong.

Anyway I'm still hedging my bets on an draw between the ice-age in one corner and our attempt at global central heating on the other

10:55 / 18.01.06

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the info.

17:50 / 18.01.06

Metallurgy and Engineering

both important factors in re-creating a functioning society

13:12 / 20.01.06

Are we assuming that the survivors will remember how to read? What language or languages should be included?

Or should everything be in pictograms?

13:54 / 20.01.06

Are we assuming that the survivors will remember how to read?

That's part of what I meant by accessibility, Sekhmet. We must presume they will need to learn to read using our system, so some sort of ideographic writing system coupled with a very direct language might well be the way to go.

A much greater problem is of course, what will last one hundred millennia and still remain legible or readable?

15:05 / 20.01.06

Hrrm. Embossed titanium sheets? Carved stone?

The pyramids are making more sense to me suddenly...

22:24 / 20.01.06

the immediate surviors would, more than likely, be able to read and as such would (I hope) teach reading and writing to future generations. Another question is, what language should this information be written in? Perhaps copies in all languages should be stored together, which would eliminate the need to preserve different languages in a more verbose way (such as translation dictionaries).

05:50 / 21.01.06

the immediate surviors would, more than likely, be able to read and as such would (I hope) teach reading and writing to future generations.

I think Mr Lovelock expects a very long sequence of disasters over a period of tens of thousands of years that will, via a series of increasingly less sophisticated civilisations, eventually reduce the human race to a couple of thousand monkey boys with fire and simple tools, maybe the wheel and the sort of language that goes with that level of sophistication.

02:25 / 23.01.06

The pyramids are making more sense to me suddenly...

behold a book about how the pyramids (and the mayan calendar, and various other archeological and mythological artifacts) are secret messages from a previous human civilization trying to help us avoid the apocalypse, this time. i think the book goes a little too far by analyzing the numerology in various myths (like the 72 conspirators who killed osiris), but its a relevant idea.

Tryphena Absent

12:29 / 23.01.06

So we're going to be reduced to the sophistication of cavemen but it's always been a good idea to put radioactive waste in the ground with no way to alert people who can't read that it's there.

James Lovelock, a man to be held up to the world for astounding logical prowess.

13:15 / 23.01.06

Maybe he's thinking it would be better for some of the survivors to stumble across nuclear waste as oppossed to there being no one to find anything.

13:30 / 23.01.06

I suspect that a couple of year ago he still thought global warming could be halted, if we switch to nuclear power. He doesn't seem to think that any more.

14:49 / 23.01.06

Wasn't there an America architectural project a few years back brainhousing designs for a 100,000+year nuclear-waste storage site? I remember reading an article about coming up with landscapes around such facilities designed to look nightmarish and inhospitable on a gut/primal level. Wrongplaces. Places that wouldn't need language to say "don't fucking live here". Anyone else heard about this?

07:08 / 24.01.06

Somewhat tangentially, today's Independent tells us that

Britain has 2.3 million cubic metres of nuclear waste stored around the country - more than enough to fill the Albert Hall five times. Exposure to even a tiny amount of the most potent type could kill an adult within two minutes - and it remains lethal for one million years. It will cost £85 billion to bury all this radioactive rubbish - but our governments have dodged the decision of where to put it for 30 years. As Tony Blair takes the first steps towards building ten new nuclear reactors to plug the looming energy gap, shouldn't we clear up this mess first?

I should however be noted that

High-level waste, which is so radioactive it generates heat, comes mainly from the waste products from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. It is estimated to total 1,340 cubic metres - just 0.1 per cent of the total waste by volume - yet accounts for 95 per cent of the total radioactivity of the entire waste inventory.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:00 / 24.01.06

B-but, without radioactive waste, how will the few survivors of mankind evolve the superpowers they'll need to survive the new hostile environment?

I'm wondering if something akin to the 2001 monolith could be devised, whereby people have to develop more skills in order to discover more.

11:17 / 24.01.06

Excuse my ignorance, but does the monolith actually do anything to the apemen, or later the humans, to induce them to evolve. I mean other than it's just being alien - not a natural structure?

12:02 / 24.01.06

The KEO satellite (as described in Wikipedia)
The KEO satellite is a satellite space time capsule which will be launched in the end of year 2007 or 2008 carrying messages from the citizens of present Earth to earthlings 50,000 years from now, when the satellite orbiting Earth will return.
...
Every single human is invited to write a message addressed to the future beings
...
KEO will also carry a diamond that encases a drop of human blood and samples of air, sea water and earth. The DNA of the human genome will be engraved on one of the faces. The satellite will also carry an astronomical clock that shows current rotation rates of several pulsars; photographs of people of all cultures; and a "Contemporary library of Alexandria", an encyclopaedic compendium of current human knowledge.
...
The messages and library will be encoded in glass-made radiation-resistant DVDs. Symbolic instructions in several formats will show the future finders how to build a DVD reader, which may no longer exist 50,000 years from now.

14:59 / 24.01.06

50,000 years? DVDs will be lucky to exist in 50,000 seconds. They're already releasing newer storage formats.

That article doesn't say how they'll be presenting the complete Barbelith archive ...

18:10 / 24.01.06

50,000 years? DVDs will be lucky to exist in 50,000 seconds.

From the KEO FAQ:
In July 1998, the National Grand Accelerator of Heavy Ions (GANIL) conducted an experiment whereby glass disks on which our messages will be engraved were exposed to intensive radiation. The experiment showed that the disks and their data remained intact even after they were exposed to an equivalent amount of cosmic radiation that they will undergo in 50,000 years.

18:34 / 24.01.06

I vote for the Kama Sutra and lots of hentai manga. That ougtha keep the survivors too busy to screw up again

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