How Can We Create a Manual for Civilization? (2017)

https://longnow.org/ideas/02017/06/07/how-can-we-create-a-manual-for-civilization/

by throw0101c • 4 years ago

40 36 4 years ago

longnow.org

MrBuddyCasino2• 4 years ago

We could, it would be very politically incorrect therefore we can't.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

What is politically incorrect about saying:

    To get a civilization, you will need to have 10s to 100s of thousands of people living in close proximity?

(along with, presumably, some more detailed tips as to how one tackles the various problems arising on the way to that goal...)

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

There's a lot of things in your comment that you're leaving unsaid; please, elaborate.

MrBuddyCasino2• 4 years ago

I’m afraid I can’t.

lvl102• 4 years ago

Why would you want to create a manual when we clearly failed in current form?

giantg2• 4 years ago

If you read the article, it's basically what knowledge via books we would want to pass on if civilization was restarting. Hopefully that would mean we select to correct for our current failing for the hypothetical next civilization.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

Except... we haven't failed? We're still around. Sure, there's imperfections and we know how to solve or prevent them from happening again - which is what should be preserved, rough edges and all. Like, "we tried democracy but these are the downsides and here's some situations where the imperfect system was abused", or "here is a super effective source of energy, but here's some situations where it went wrong and we irradiated large areas"

"we clearly failed" is catastrophising the current situation and is a defeatist attitude.

tablespoon2• 4 years ago

Except... we haven't failed? We're still around.

The use case for a "Manual for Civilization" is a scenario where we have failed, so it's a valid assumption when considering something like this.

It might be pretty unwise to create such a manual, because it would almost certainly be a manual for repeating the last set of mistakes.

towaway154632• 4 years ago

The fact that you didn’t die when you were 2 months old begs to differ.

andrewla2• 4 years ago

A lot of comments disparaging this, but it is fundamentally correct.

If our civilization as it is survives and does not collapse, then this "manual" is unnecessary.

It is only useful if our civilization has clearly failed.

Maybe sanitation was a huge mistake. Maybe antibiotics were a huge mistake. Maybe the remnants of humanity that survive the apocalypse will look back on a humanity all but wiped out by superbugs of their own making.

Maybe agriculture was a huge mistake. Maybe the march towards monocultures is inevitable, and the remnants of humanity that survive the apocalypse will look back on a humanity all but wiped out by blights or the total depletion of fertile topsoil.

For anything that we wish to impart to these remnants, there's a scenario where that is why we failed, because we must assume that we did fail to justify the attempt at the manual at all.

JoeAltmaier2• 4 years ago

Who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilizations?

mbg721• 4 years ago

Defeating the failure of civilization entirely is a really high bar; the thing we're trying to prevent is failing faster and more painfully. This is like asking "Why would people who are going to die anyway bother having hospitals?"

klyrs2• 4 years ago

That's a good consideration, and any such document must display ample humility. Today, we could fill several volumes with "This is what we know we got wrong, this is how we might have avoided it."

Alternatively, hook the reader with the power of the nuclear weaponry, and write with an unironic lack of self awareness. Trust the reader to read between the lines. What could possibly go wrong?

andrewla2• 4 years ago

Do we, though, know what we got wrong?

In the hypothetical, our civilization has failed and a new group is trying to use this manual to start up civilization again. Who is to say that one of the things that we think we got wrong would, in fact, have saved our civilization?

To put it differently [1]:

Who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilizations?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638385

throw0101a2• 4 years ago

Why would you want to create a manual when we clearly failed in current form?

Because it could be not-failed at Time F but failed at Time X, and somewhere between the two a bad decision was made. If you know what the previous civ did, you can perhaps learn from their mistakes and bootstrap yourself until the bad branch point and take a different path at that point.

towaway154632• 4 years ago

More important would be to preserve a very thorough and accurate recording of everything we’ve done so any future civilization could analyze it and determine what we did wrong and how to avoid it. More importantly though we should be working on solving the problems we have and making sure our current civilization doesn’t fail.

Spending a lot of effort on something like this seems akin to writing a letter to the next tenant for your apartment while you should be working to keep your job so you can stay in the apartment.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

I think so too. I don't think that preserving technological progress is as important as preserving history.

The focus should be mainly history with some foundational scientific works.

Or don't try to preserve anything. If a future civilization needs it then the current civilization obviously messed up big time and don't deserve to say anything else. Our shameful wreckage will be ubiquitous and apparent to any future inhabitants. Just die quietly and leave it at that.

throw0101a2• 4 years ago

From a technological point of view, the following book would be useful:

The Knowledge is a journey of discovery, a book which explains everything you need to know about everything. This is a quick-start guide for rebooting civilisation which will transform your understanding of the world – and help you prepare for when it’s no longer here…

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/buy-the-book/

Along with the books in its bibliography:

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/

Further references on medical knowledge and Germ Theory would be good, especially on how to make soap and how to create microscopes so we can see germs.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

A book on anatomy would be useful too so we don't have to rediscover what various bits and pieces and parts do.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

I agree with the topics chosen, but I fear a lot of this information couod be very hypothetical, like a wikipedia article does not enable you to reproduce the same results.

When you learn practical skills, like how to fix your bike, how to solder, how to find good iron ore, your best bet is to learn from a real person so you can exprerience all the intangiable things that go with learning a skill.

A youtube video course is the closest substitute i guess.

tablespoon2• 4 years ago

From a technological point of view, the following book would be useful:
> The Knowledge is a journey of discovery, a book which explains everything you need to know about everything. This is a quick-start guide for rebooting civilisation which will transform your understanding of the world – and help you prepare for when it’s no longer here…
I agree with the topics chosen, but I fear a lot of this information [could] be very hypothetical, like a wikipedia article does not enable you to reproduce the same results.

It almost certainly is. The book is 352 pages, according to Amazon, so at best it's a extremely high-level outline.

An actual manual would be very long and tedious, and certainly wouldn't sell well as a popular book. I'd imagine it would be at least a couple times larger than a collection of all the undergrad textbooks for all the practical courses at a decent university circa 1950 (you've got to get the concepts, plus important implementation details).

A manual for bootstrapping a subsistence farming community would probably be a lot shorter and more practical.

lake_vincent• 4 years ago

Found em: https://archive.org/details/civ-vi-25-th-online-manual-eng

(Just kidding, don't hurt me)

failrate• 4 years ago

Manga copies of Dr. Stone?

bombcar• 4 years ago

Whatever you do don’t put them on giant concrete pillars in the middle of a field somewhere.

pjc50• 4 years ago

The references in the comments to germ theory and the bible make clear a more serious problem: once you've created such a manual, how do you get whoever it's aimed at to care? Why should they respect you as a source of knowledge and not someone within their civilization?

To the extent that we have a "manual for civilization" in the present day - and there are lots of really unresolved questions! - the same problem applies.

freedude3• 4 years ago

"how do you get whoever it's aimed at to care?" When there is an emptiness inside that must be filled. What do you fill it with?

hellohowareu• 4 years ago

The headline reminds me of an organization with a similar mission--

Open Source Ecology

"...currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker."

We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy – an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration."

https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-overview/

cjameskeller• 4 years ago

Much respect for this org and its founder. They are also doing great work with their "Seed Eco Home" project: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Seed_Home_v2

jmyeet• 4 years ago

This is a fun thought experiment. It usually comes up in the context of how would we rebuild if a war or some natural disaster threw civilization back into the Stone Age.

From a science point-of-view, a lot of progress was just about figuring out things we didn't know (obviously). Things like we live in a spheroid planet that orbits a Sun and matter is made up of ~93 naturally occurring elements and a bunch of others we can make. Those elements are made up of atoms that are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

I just summarized what took millenia to figure out originally. You'd likely never have to figure that out again and that would greatly accelerate any progress from bashing rocks together to building rockets.

So the issue then is how do you preserve information. The more information dense storage methods require more technology and/or don't last as long. The longest method of information preservation we have thus far is probably clay tablets.

I wonder how long ink and paper could survive in a vacuum chamber.

And then we get into what to preserve (in this article). This project includes works of literature and other cultural texts. This seems to be rather arbitrary to me. I mean in 1,000 years will people have the same cultural context to appreciate that? What about in a million years?

We're already selective in what we retain and learn because there's simply too much. If, like me, you believe a Dyson Swarm is humanity's future then this problem gets much worse. I read once that if we had a full Dyson Swarm around the Sun, you could write one page about each orbital and have millions of pages, more than any person could ever read. At that's one page about the entire history and culture of each orbital, each being possibly millions of people.

The very idea of a universal culture seems absurd in such a situation.

maliker• 4 years ago

Someone tried to do a bullet point version but it got blown up recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

bmitc• 4 years ago

The response to that is basically the same extremism that you read about in the Middle East and now more and more in the U.S. I mean, the guy paid for it with his own or his group's own money and it had harmless, if not both noble and naive, inscriptions on it, and people defaced it and then eventually blew it up in a terrorist act.

JoeAltmaier2• 4 years ago

Several parts to civilization: culture, environment, people. Hard to nail any of them down up front.

Anyway, who wants a how-to manual from a failed civilization? Presuming ours(?) failed and the manual is needed.

freedude3• 4 years ago

They should have titled this the Humanist manual for Civilization. The most significant influence in civilization is the Bible. This is worse than missing a solution. It is looking a problem, seeing the piece that fits the puzzle and looking away for another piece that never quite fits because they don't like what it means. It is voluntary, self-imposed blindness.

noSyncCloud• 4 years ago

What an incredibly chauvinistic and Euro-centric take.

freedude3• 4 years ago

Yours is one intolerant viewpoint. Regardless, since 16th century or so what is good in western civilization has been promoted by Christian belief.

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

Semi-related, but it seems like getting railroad transport would require good metals, so it couldn't really happen before it did in reality. But I wonder if something like telegraph or radio could exist with more primitive materials?

How Can We Create a Manual for Civilization? (2017)

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