weird-inAnApocalypseWhatToSave

Periodically the idea comes up of storing some knowledge in a durable form so that if there's an apocalypse, that knowledge will be preserved.

If this was to be done, what should we save?

We could save technology, but at this time it's still uncertain if technology makes life better or worse, or more precisely, which technologies make life better and which make life worse, and if it's possible to have one without the other. E.g. if there is an apocalypse, it will probably be caused/mediated by advanced technology. And it's clear that technology is not merely a tool that is used by society, but that the presence of specific technologies affect the social organization of society (e.g. imagine the effects of guns, electricity, telecommunications, tanks, airplanes, nuclear weapons, the internet).

Now, in the present day no apocalypse has occurred, and we like tech, but if an apocalypse were to occur, that would provide evidence that would make us more suspicious of the goodness of tech (see e.g. the comic form of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind). Since the knowledge we are discussing saving would only matter anyways in the even of an apocalypse, perhaps we should NOT preserve tech knowledge.

Science knowledge quickly leads to tech knowledge, so perhaps we should not preserve scientific knowledge either.

Similarly, there are many 'social technologies', such as democracy and voting and capitalism and high finance, that perhaps we shouldn't preserve for the same reason. And the same for culture.

In other words, we might want to consider most information from the civilization that generated the apocalypse to be 'memetically dangerous' and to quarantine it.

So what does that leave us? What information does a civilization produce that is not memetically suspect given only that the civilization that produced it failed horribly?

It leaves us things that are too abstract and too universal to have much effect on determining the organization of future societies.

Some things clearly in this category are music and mathematics.

So, even in the case that society is doomed to repeatedly build up to a technological pinnacle and then fall, something good can be produced and accumulated along the way and given to future generations: music and math.

Another thing that perhaps should be preserved is other forms of art. Illustrations are probably pretty safe. Books might be memetically suspect. But perhaps we should allow children's books; they are memetically laden, it's true, but the memes are probably pretty innocuous compared to the memes in adult books.

Now, how should we transmit this? One problem is that a technology good for transmitting books can transmit Wikipedia, which is what we don't want to do. But if we focus on music and math we can avoid this by creating special-purpose transmission artifacts.

E.g. things that play music, and educational toys that teach math.

In addition, we should use people as transmission vessels whenever possible.

Which means that here is what we should do: