Long Now Brussels Meetup - November 02010

Sometimes in the course of human history civilisations suffer cataclysmic breakdown. When this occurs vital knowledge and skills may pass beyond recall. (For an interesting survey of collapsed civilisations see Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.) Much that we take for granted today would most likely not be here were it not for the work of ancient monastics and scholars who rescued bits and pieces from the wreckage of earlier societies.

During the Cold War humanity narrowly escaped catastrophe on more than one occasion. Our iPhones may not save us. What are we doing for future generations? Gregory Benford’s book, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (which is unfortunately out of print but readily available secondhand) provides a thought-provoking study of the problem of communicating to far-distant generations.

Time is no friend to information. Books rot, libraries burn, and it’s simply impractical to carve every word into stone. One approach - popular in the 20th century - is the time capsule. Basically, the idea is to stick a bunch of stuff that might be useful one day into an airtight vault, seal it up, and record the location for future generations. (For more info, see the International Time Capsule Society website: http://snipurl.com/1cf42p) We’ve spent the past few decades frenetically storing our information on electronic media. While there may be some chance that 1,500 years from now paper books stored in a time capsule may be readable, what is the likelihood of people still using Microsoft Office? The information age has given us great freedom and flexibility in many ways but if the power grid goes down future generations are pretty much screwed. Unfortunately, in the case that our civilisation were to collapse the power grid would probably be the first thing to go. What would future archaeologists make of our era if they only had access to our analog artifacts?

As I was thinking about this topic I was reminded of a Long Now blog posting from this past Spring. I suggest that you have a look at Alexander Rose’s “Manual for Civilisation” post: http://snipurl.com/1cf98z. For the November meetup we will discuss the question: what information would be useful to future generations trying to rebuild and how could we preserve the message?

Please, if you plan to come an RSVP is much appreciated. RSVP to this Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/longnowbrussels/calendar/15231628/

The Long Now meetups are facilitated by Trey Darley.