h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thought provoking again my friend!

If we are looking at the latest civilization fail, how do we know what the next will be looking for? Knowledge passed down to our (hopefully) better descendants may be utterly useless to them, or seen as antiquated superstition.

It's a good topic.... Right, I'm off to consult my Mayan calendar and get the tin foil out....

I also suggest you read the book 'Riddley Walker' by Russell Hoban. Hoban was born in the town where Elektra grew up, but moved to the UK. His novel, ahead of its time in terms of 'post-apocalyptic', takes place in southeast England, and uses the legend of St Eustache to great effect.

Capitol by Orson Scott Card is my all time civilization falling go to read. I'll have a look for Ridley Walker, thanks.

FWR, we should just write down what we think we know and what ideas we have. A true societal collapse will see a massive loss of knowledge in the 'society as a whole'... so any knowledge saved and kept can help the new civilisation rebuild. They're going to be rebuilding from a point in many ways 'lower' than what we have now. They will decide what they are able to use and what not ... but we should do our best to leave them something.

Anyways spot on Dmitri.

And *what we think we know* may be the problem!

Amen to that, FWR. For over a thousand years, people believed some very silly things originally said by Aristotle. Also, sometime, try reading the 'Physiologus' of Isidore of Seville. Very peculiar stories about animals...

Saving accounts of what we think we know should be seen as an opportunity for the next generation to decide whether this was useful information.

The conclusion could then be: If we do that, everything goes wrong, so let's try something different this time round.

Very well said! And the right way to read so many ancient texts.

"Scriptoria saved what the Greeks and Romans knew." Hmmm, well I think the Arabic scholars had a considerable hand in that project, too.

Definitely! Also Jewish ones. Western Europe certainly benefited from Arab scholarship. I would add that the reverence those monks out on the fringes of civilisation displayed for the written word helped establish a tradition of validation for transmitting ideas this way. Otherwise, the yahoos might have dismissed the books out of hand.

All I can add is a comment that Kurt Vonnegut made about Indianapolis, namely that when he went back to the city in his old age, the places were there, but the people he once knew were gone, as if a neutron bomb had exploded, erasing the people but leaving the property intact.

I sometimes think about the lovely places I enjoyed going to in the 1950s. Places still there, people long gone.

In my case, there are so many wild places I've known with their unique plants and animals and natural beauty, that are now residential areas, factories, shopping malls ...

Anyways when saving up knowledge for the future, it needs to be printed, not on computers! Because when society crashes, that kind of technology will be lost. Physical books will at least have a chance of survival ...

Even a small library can contain a good chunk of human knowledge. My library here at home has books on (university level) physics, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, biology - books about prehistoric life, MANY books on birds, mammals, fishes, reptiles, amphibians, insects, plants of all kinds ... I have an almost complete set of encyclopedias about all the bird species of the world. I have books about art, about music, especially opera, I have a decent collection of classical works of literature in Afrikaans, English and Dutch, with a few books in French and German. Oh, and dictionaries galore. And books and magazines *about* literature. And religion, I have the Quran and some Hindu and Buddhist texts along with lots of bibles and Christian theology. Oh, and books on history. A complete set of Colliers encyclopedias from the 70's. A few editions of the Guinness Book of Records (old books, these days they look like trash). Many popular science books. I reckon if this library could be preserved exactly as is, then someone from a a couple of centuries from now, rising up from the ashes of our civilization, will be able to learn much about what we knew and thought we knew ...

Look on my works and despair (Oyzmandias by Shelley) points out the same: he also Shelly compare thee to a summer's day - oh no, that somebody else wasn't it?

Spot the missing words round (too busy laughing to myself, to notice I had missed them)

I thought you already adjusted your spelling to the upcoming civilisation.

Just wondering if we should include a manual on how to use paper books to our tomes of knowledge.

Okay, if we're going there...

Anybody here who hasn't read 'Enoch Soames' yet?

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/760/pg760-images.html

I'm never sure if everyone knows this story. It was popular enough once upon a time that people actually showed up in the British Library to see if the time traveller showed up...

My master list of books everyone should read only lists "Zuleika Dobson" by Beerbohm.

I liked "The Time-traveller's wife." I liked it so much that I have not gone out of my way to read any other books about time travel.

There are surely thousands of worthy books out there, but I dutifully read a hundred top-rated books a year for many years, and I finally got tired of finding myself in the middle of books that I really wasn't enjoying.