If we deeply deeply care about general risk that wipes out 90% of all humans and/or 90% of all technology and information storage, we need not only technological solutions but we need a culture that deeply deeply cares about prevention and, since this is the actual hypothetical, preparation. What that means is that any professional possessing any useful knowledge in building the technological foundations of civilizations makes at least basic preparations to store and transfer his knowledge, both about his tools and any theoretical foundations. That means learning the basics by heart so in case of their survival this knowledge is available. This means storing copies of all the basic books in safe places. Fewer copies of more advanced books. And maybe one with very specialised knowledge.
It means having a basic supply of unusually hardy but more effective tools that is not used in day-to-day business. Screwdrivers, hammers and axes are basic tools almost everyone should have at home, but anything that moves is more fragile and should be available to any community in a hardy version, as easy to use and maintain as possible. Even worse is anything that calculates electronically. These things tend to break completely, are impossible to repair and need to be replaced using absurdly advanced machinery. It is exactly there parts that need to be replaced with less potent equivalents, and it is exactly that absurdly advanced machinery that needs to be protected together with all knowledge and specialised people around them.
But what should such a culture look like? How could it be installed? I do not have the faintest idea. What we are looking for is an antifragile community or society, living the life today but prepared for a future much much worse than this one. What I do know is that no single human could prepare himself for such a dystopian future, only whole communities. All amenities we enjoy in civilization are only here because we cooperate and so we will only further enjoy them if we continue to cooperate after the event.
Knowledge is an extremely fragile thing. Small preliterate societies forgot basic things like how to make a canoe because their population shrunk. Will we forget even basic things like to avoid radioactive waste disposal sites? Quite possibly. But did we forget religion and cultural tropes over thousands of years? We did not. They changed, yes, but we did not forget, they're still here. So that's where I would look for preparation.
This means storing copies of all the basic books in safe places.
I think we already are at the point where that's the case. Storage is cheap enough that many people have pirated versions of all the major textbooks.
But what should such a culture look like? How could it be installed? I do not have the faintest idea. What we are looking for is an antifragile community or society, living the life today but prepared for a future much much worse than this one.
Resilient communities can give you a view of many things. John Robb wrote also various things on...
I was wondering how seriously we've considered storing useful information to improve the chance of rebounding from a global catastrophe. I'm sure this has been discussed previously, but not in sufficient depth that I could find it on a short search of the site. If we value future civilisation, then, it may be worth going to significant length to reduce existential risks.
Some interventions will target specific risky tech, like AI and synthetic biology. However, just as many of today's risks could not have been identified a century ago, we should expect some emerging risks of the coming decades to also catch us by surprise. As argued by Karim Jebari, even if risks are not identifiable, we can take general-purpose methods to reduce them, by analogy to the principles of robustness and safety factors in engineering. One such idea is, to create a store of the kind of items one would want to recover from catastrophe. This idea varies based on which items are chosen and where they are stored.
Nick Beckstead has investigated bunkers, and he basically rejected bunker-improvement because the strength of a bunker would not improve our resilience to known risks like AI, nuclear weapons or biowarfare. However, his analysis was fairly limited in scope. He focused largely on where to put people, food and walls, in order to manage known risks. It would be useful for further analysis to consider where you can put other items, like books, batteries or 3D printers, in an analysis of a range of scenarios that could arise from known or unknown risks. Though we can't currently identify many plausible risks that would leave us without 99% of civilisation, that's still a plausible situation that it's good to equip ourselves to recover from. What information would we store?
The Knowledge, How to Rebuild Civilisation From Scratch would be a good candidate based on its title alone, and a quick skim over i09's review. One could bury Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, or a bunch of other items suggested by The Long Now Foundation. A computer with a battery perhaps? Perhaps all of the above, to ward against the possibility that we miscalculate. Where would we store it? Again, the principle of resilience would seem to dictate that we should store these in a variety of sites. They could be underground and overground, marked and unmarked at busy and deserted sites of varying climate, and with various levels of security. In general, this seems to be neglected, cheap, and unusually valuable, and so I would be interested to hear whether LessWrong has any further ideas about how this could be done well.
Further relevant reading: Adaptation to and Recovery From Global Catastrophe, Svalbard Global Seed Vault (a biodiversity store in the far North of Norway, started by Gates and others).