The Doomsday Archive, Part I

(this is the script for a youtube presentation, so it's a bit rough, but it's hints of things to come in my non-fiction work). 

Well, here you are. You saw the “doomsday” library heading and got interested. I thank you. But before we talk about the nitty-gritty of our doomsday box and doomsday archive, we need to talk a little bit about doomsday, and why a doomsday library is important.

Now, I’m going to discount things like Earth gets hit by an Eros-sized asteroid, everyone dies. This is about doomsdays that don’t quite kill us all.

But, more so than ever, they will cause a massive disconnect between what came before and after, and without preparation, would lead to mankind forgetting much of what makes up our civilization.

See, there have been disconnects before. Much of the knowledge and culture that existed before the Bronze Age Collapse vanished. The city of Ugarit, for example, remained largely unknown until it was rediscovered in 1928.  Another case would be the waves of pandemics that struck the Americas after first contact with the Europeans. That was such a total disaster that we still don’t know actually how many inhabitants died, just that many advanced, semi-urbanized cultures located in North America, more or less vanished.

Modern society is even more vulnerable to this, for several reasons.

First of all, our society is immensely complex. In the past, as many as ninety percent of the population was involved in farming. Today, it’s just over ten percent—and that includes people who are only peripherally involved in growing the food. And that food has to be transported to vast urban concentrations that physically could not grow their own food, even if they knew how. If something happened to cut off LA from its food supply, you could turn every person in the region into Johnny Appleseed, and most of ‘em would still be dead in a few weeks.

And among the dead would be a vast number of people with skills that make our modern world. Doctors, engineers, and scientists of all stripes. Lawyers (and if you don’t think the law has a lot to do with society, take a look at some of our first written documents). Accountants. Everything needed to maintain this vastly complex society, would be some of the first things lost.

Worse, the lion’s share of mankind’s knowledge would also go away. If there’s no power, the Internet won’t function. Maybe losing pornhub isn’t a great tragedy (though some would disagree), but for future historians, the loss of literally zettabytes of information would be a tragedy. Libraries are notoriously flammable structures, and more of them are dependent on the Internet. College libraries, the places where much of our scientific knowledge is held, are located in the very regions that any collapse would hit hardest.

So this presents us with two problems. First of all, any large-scale collapse would see mankind needing to fall back on the very skills that have become rare. Farming, smelting, the base of the pyramid that took us to the stars, most of those skills only exist among hobbyists, today. And in a world where “getting food” no longer means “pop out to the Walmart” relearning those skills will be pretty damned important.

Secondly, the skills that go into an advanced technological society, would, almost certainly, be lost. If you’re struggling to feed a rural village that has survived/missed the mega-whoops, you have no resources for open-heart surgery, or computer science, or any of a thousand other things. And after the first generation… the people who could teach you those skills will be dead, and most of the written material will be lost. Oh, they may still exist, here and there, but go to your library, pick out one-hundred books at random, and see how much detailed information you get on smelting metal. An advanced technological society doesn’t just need knowledge, it needs organizedknowledge.

But there’s a different type of collapse. Say, tomorrow there’s an economic catastrophe, and suddenly all those Youtube ads get pulled. What happens? Likely, all those endless cat videos, funny humor bits, and independent videos get pulled.  Modern society has an immense amount of information, and it’s growing all the time, and if it isn’t as important to the ability to just live… it’s important for our cultural memory, and it could vanish, even if we don’t face a total doomsday scenario.

We’re already seeing that. Go back to that DIY site you remember from say, 2001, and if it’s still online, you will probably find a collection of broken links. The Internet, contrary to popular belief, isn’t forever. And that’s a problem because the Internet is eclipsing every other form of cultural memory we have.

So, today, we have two challenges for our “doomsday archives.” The first is the box that tells you how to go from “everything is on fire, and my phone doesn’t work” to rebuilding a technological society. The second is creating an archive that will store as much of our collected wisdom, and yes, cat videos, as possible, not just to protect against a doomsday, but to ensure that future generations will be able to access our culturalheritage, even if the owners of Youtube decided to go all in on Pogs tomorrow.

And save the cat videos. That’s also important.