DoomsDay Project

I concur with many others that there needs to be a backup made of all the world's knowledge, for the potential event, which is well within the realm of possibility, that civilization as we know it is destroyed. The backup must be in imperishable format, which excludes magnetic copies. Perhaps a certain hardy breed of optical discs could be used, but the knowledge regarding how to build machines that will read and power these discs must obviously be stored in a different format, perhaps paper, parchment or papyrus. We must include a Rosetta Stone consisting of images and their verbal equivalents, because it is not certain that language will remain unchanged. The security of this backup is the most important aspect, because if it is discovered by primitive people of no understanding, it will all be wasted upon them. The archive must be sealed using a method that is impenetrable except by technological means that reflect a Renaissance-era civilization, and it must also be hidden, yet detectable by advanced deduction, for instance, recognizing artificial (man-made) features in an environment. Redundancy is essential too, because some backup locations may be compromised by primitives or obscured by the shifting landmasses of the planet. A thousand airtight and waterproof capsules should be dispersed over the globe, some underwater, some in the desert, some in the tundra, and everywhere in between.

A further refinement to this idea would be to lock and entrap the capsule, requiring the answer to a riddle for access. If an incorrect answer is attempted, the contents of the capsule can be destroyed using acid or perhaps a different kind of chemical reaction. The riddle will require empathy in order to solve. This would offer the capsule some protection against being discovered and misused by evil-doers. Unfortunately, history has a way of repeating itself, and a capsule with a lot of technological knowledge in it is not necessarily a good idea. What the human race needs more than technology is philosophy. Technology brings many horrors into the world and empowers the dark, powerful, tyrannical souls to dominate others. Perhaps the capsule should indeed contain nothing of technology and only philosophy, to point out the ways to obtain learning merely, without giving explicit instructions on how to build this and that. The great frailty in the human race is that a human mind can be very apt at technology and care nothing at all for philosophy. It is better that philosophers hold the keys to technology rather than tyrants and would-be tyrants, as is the case in many countries today.