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Tetronian comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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Suppose you know from good sources that there is going to be a huge catastrophe in the very near future, which will result in the near-extermination of humanity (but the natural environment will recover more easily). You and a small group of ordinary men and women will have to restart from scratch.
You have a limited time to compile a compendium of knowledge to preserve for the new era. What is the most important knowledge to preserve?
I am humbled by how poorly my own personal knowledge would fare.
Let's examine the problem in more detail: Different disaster scenarios would require different pieces of information, so it would help if you knew exactly what kind of catastrophe. However, if you can preserve a very large compendium of knowledge, then you can create a catalogue of necessary information for almost every type of doomsday scenario (nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, etc.) so that you will be prepared for almost anything. If the amount of information you can save is more limited, then you should save the pieces of information that are the most likely to be useful in any given scenario in "catastrophe-space." Now we have to go about determining what these pieces of information are. We can start by looking at the most likely doomsday scenarios--Yoreth, since you started the thread, what do you think the most likely ones are?
I suppose, perhaps, an asteroid impact or nuclear holocaust? It's hard for me to imagine a disaster that wipes out 99.999999% of the population but doesn't just finish the job. The scenario is more a prompt to provoke examination of the amount of knowledge our civilization relies on.
(What first got me thinking about this was the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth. But you would be hard pressed to restart civilization from a space station, at least at current tech levels.)
The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth's population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we've been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is "irreducibly complex"--for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).
I am not following this. Why would the anthropic principle no longer apply if you went into space?
I think it's a quantum immortality argument. If you, the observer, are no longer on Earth, the Earth can be destroyed because its destruction no longer necessitates your death.