A manual for civilization

[Guru Coyote]

What kind of books, records etc. would one need to reboot civilization after it has totally collapsed?

the Long Now Foundation is building such a library:
» Toward a Manual for Civilization - Blog of the Long Now

As interesting as that is in itself... here is my idea for Fantasy/Fiction writing:

What if there was a civilization that is doing rather well on its own, let's take the standard medieval type fantasy civilization.
Now they stumble upon such a (well-hidden) cache of ancient lore, a library that was meant to enable survivors of an apocalypse to rebuild a civilization - in the image of the ancients who buried the library.

This might well be the theme for an anthology!

I'd love to hear your ideas, thoughts, musings!
(I have a feeling this idea is a major puzzle piece that I was searching for in my own WiP)

 

[WooHooMan]

Didn't this kind of happen in real life. Wasn't a big part of the Renaissance that people in Europe had access to earlier writings dating as far back as ancient Rome and Greece? I'm not a huge history guy so I could be wrong.

In any case, it sounds pretty cool and I could see it working in a fantasy setting. For example, apparently in Tolkein's writing (I hate how all fantasy leads to Tolkein but whatever), ancient Elves had access to crazy technology like advance medicine and space travel but as time went on, they forgot about it. The Middle-Earth Elves' niche is language so it would make sense that they wrote that stuff down.

I had an idea in one of my stories where ancient information is stored in like an ancient clockwork analog computer like the Antikythera mechanism or a tide-predicting machine. I think that'd be way more interesting than a bunch of books or stone tablets.

 

[SmokeScribe98]

This sounds a lot like the Renaissance to me, which is brilliant in my opinion and its something I want to have in my own novel. The Renaissance was a great period in history and its something that interests me especially, good luck.

 

[Guru Coyote]

The analogy to Renaissance is definitely valid, with one difference: the Manual for Civilization here is specifically put together to bootstrap a people back to the level of civilization the former society had. The ancient books/mechanisms etc. that our history has lost and re-found tended to be collections of "everything we know." Or, what later was actually recovered... a random fragment of all they knew.

Just because it is so cool, here's a link:
Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oh, and sure, the idea has been done before. But then, hasn't anything

 

[shwabadi]

Sounds like a good base for a story, although it does remind me of some pre-existing sci-fi motifs, especially in games.
Although I guess the major difference is that in things like Mass Effect they use the knowledge of Alien races to advance their civilisations rather than the knowledge of an extinct, indigenous people.

That Antikythera mechanism is also pretty interesting! I'll have to have a better look at that sometime.

 

[Guru Coyote]

The idea is definitely not new
I remember smiling broadly when I read Vernor Vinge talk about Archologist Programmers and how in that universe it wasn't a question of "if they have reached a high tech level" but only "how many times."

 

[Shockley]

Didn't this kind of happen in real life. Wasn't a big part of the Renaissance that people in Europe had access to earlier writings dating as far back as ancient Rome and Greece? I'm not a huge history guy so I could be wrong.

The last paper I wrote was on Renaissance patronage, so I want to drop in and talk a little about what was motivating this stuff just so we can get a fuller picture of a society rediscovering its roots, and recognize that it wasn't just about a pile of books.

You have a few very important figures/events that coalesce to create the Renaissance, as well as some important consequences.

- Coluccio Salutati was the Chancellor of Florence and found himself in a prolonged military struggle with Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first Duke of Milan. Along with Milan, Visconti controlled Pavia, Vicenza, Verona and Padua and was allied with the powerful Duke of Orleans, making him the single most powerful military leader in Italy at this time. After defeating a joint Bolognan/Florentine army, Visconti fell into rather heavy resistance from the Florentines and died before his conquest could succeed. Salutati, and his successor/pupil Leonardo Bruni, became interested in understanding why Florence was able to resist Visconti where others couldn't and started glorifying the old Roman Republic and what he called 'humanist' values. Bruni and Salutati come rather late on the scene, but they are important in that they took the philosophical ideas that were brewing under the surface and applying them to government and, eventually, every day life.

- Petrarch is particularly important, in that he was the first person to really note the cultural decline from Rome to the then-present, and created the idea of a 'middle age' between antiquity and the time he was living in. It's important to note that he didn't care about this out of some idea that Roman civilization was better or that they should recreate Roman civilization (he did embrace this idea, but after he had started his work) - he started the recovery of Roman culture in Italy because he loved poetry, and thought that Virgil, Seneca and Cicero were the great writers/poets of human history. Of course, Petrarch had been mentored to some extent by Dante, who also loved the Latins, and while Dante is probably the greater poet Petrarch had a greater role in defining the ideas and end goals of the Renaissance.

- The fall of the Byzantine Emperor is a major, major component of the Renaissance. Prior to the collapse of the Byzantines, the number of Greek scholars coming to Italy was minor - one or two might show up in a town and teach a few teenagers rudimentary Greek, but it was not enough to really engender the reclamation of an entire society. With the end of Byzantium, Greek scholars flood into Italy bringing with them all kinds of texts and a mastery of Greek and Latin that the Italians just did not have before their arrival. They are able to use these new texts to acquire new, better translations of major philosophers, political theorists, historians, etc. and really kick off the study of the classics (my paper revolved around Marsilio Ficino, who was one of the greatest Platonic scholars of the period).

- Antiquity was not universally lost. The Islamic world, for all of its faults, had maintained an interest in the ancient philosophers and thinkers in a way that the Italians had not. Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, was an Islamic scholar of Aristotelian philosophy in the 12th century and Avicenna (11th century) was engaging in protracted, complex defenses of Aristotle's works against Al-Biruni, another noted Islamic philosopher. Avicenna is essentially the greatest of the Islamic scholars, and reconciled the Aristotelian and Islamic world views well before Catholicism went through that process. Due to this, a lot of the Renaissance scholars were working with Arabic-to-Latin-to-Italian translations of Aristotle's work well before they ever received the Greek-to-Italian translations, and Averroes/Avicenna were probably as influential to the Italian Renaissance as any Italian thinkers before the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

- There was major backlash to the reclamation of lost philosophies/ideas. The religious mystic Girolamo Savonarola organized a number of Florentines, including the painter Sandro Botticelli and the philosopher Pico Della Mirandola, in an event known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. A number of books, paintings, manuscripts, music sheets, etc. deemed to be immoral were burned in a massive fire. This was done solely because Savonarola saw some of the new ideas in Italy at that point as a direct threat to their 'Christian civilization.' The sad thing is that while this was the biggest and most famous of the bonfires (due to Mirandola burning his books and Botticelli burning his paintings), this was not first nor the last - they would occur throughout the 15th century. The aftermath of the event would see not only Savonarola's death, but that of Pico Della Mirandola and Poliziano who were at the front of classics scholarship at that time.

So the point of all this is that a cache of books is great, but books alone will not be enough. You need people with a reason to look to the past (Bruni, Salutati and Petrarch), people who will commit their lives to studying their discoveries (Pico Della Mirandola and Poliziano), people who will have to figure out what the stuff actually says (the Greek scholars and others), outside forces that might already have it (Averroes and Avicenna) as well as people who will be completely disgusted by it (Savonarola).

 

[wordwalker]

Stranger than fiction.

 

[Guru Coyote]

Someone to find it, someone who can read it... and someone who cares to know.

It 'who can read it' may well be one of the biggest issues, the others seem to be something that should always be present to some extent.

What makes the Long Now Manual for Civilization - possibly - different could be the fact that it is being created with those requirements in mind. I wonder how they will solve the 'can read it' part?

 

[shwabadi]

What makes the Long Now Manual for Civilization - possibly - different could be the fact that it is being created with those requirements in mind. I wonder how they will solve the 'can read it' part?

With a lack of a universal language, I'd suggest pictograms

 

[CupofJoe]

An archaeologist friend suggested we save the instructions to Kinder Egg toys, Ikea furniture and Microsoft Licensing agreement documents. Each of these had about a dozen languages and lots of useful verbs and nouns... He said they would be invaluable in reconstructing western society [the languages were mostly European] in thousands of year times.
he also suggested etching them on to thin sheets of sapphire at different reducing scales from 1:1 to 1:1,000,000 so the future civilisation would invent microscopes along the way...

 

[Guru Coyote]

I wonder how useful the good old AOL free starter CD-ROMs are in this aspect. I recon there must be millions of them in every waste dump in the western world.

 

[wordwalker]

I wonder how useful the good old AOL free starter CD-ROMs are in this aspect. I recon there must be millions of them in every waste dump in the western world.

That's what the future uses for cobblestones.

 

[Guru Coyote]

That's what the future uses for cobblestones.

Coyote takes a good look at the cobblestones outside his cave and wonders... what kind of free trail membership those might have granted...

 

[Devor]

With a lack of a universal language, I'd suggest pictograms

Seriously, yes. But not that everything would be in pictograms. They would probably use something like pictograms and emoticons to make a dictionary that explains the language they use in the books.

The whole idea is a compelling story element, but the first six ideas I had of how it plays out aren't working for me. The most compelling idea that's coming for me is to put it in the background - the transformation is well-underway, you have a setting where some people are "educated" on the old ways and others aren't, high-tech and low-tech exist across the street from each other, and most of the conflict is more personal. Throw in a "big reveal" about the tech's nature and why the old civilization fell, and you have an epic.

 

[Guru Coyote]

"educated in the old ways" gains a double meaning here... You can have those who know of the ancient-now-new ways, and those who cling to the "old ways" of how things were done before the ancient tech was rediscovered.

 

[Daichungak]

This thread has my brain on fire. I was looking for a Sci-fi idea and this is it.

Can anybody point me in the direction of some good novels that play off this idea?

 

[Shockley]

An archaeologist friend suggested we save the instructions to Kinder Egg toys, Ikea furniture and Microsoft Licensing agreement documents. Each of these had about a dozen languages and lots of useful verbs and nouns... He said they would be invaluable in reconstructing western society [the languages were mostly European] in thousands of year times.
he also suggested etching them on to thin sheets of sapphire at different reducing scales from 1:1 to 1:1,000,000 so the future civilisation would invent microscopes along the way...

That's absolutely ingenious, though I am curious as to how well they will hold up over time. The Georgia Guidestone might end up being more useful in that respect.

This thread has my brain on fire. I was looking for a Sci-fi idea and this is it.

Can anybody point me in the direction of some good novels that play off this idea?

Not a novel at all, but Petrarch had this odd habit of writing letters to his deceased heroes. So there are a bunch of pieces of him directly addressing Cicero, Seneca, etc. ans talking about how different the world was before they had them and after they had them.

 

[Chad Lynch]

I recall reading something like this in a Vinge story. Towards the end, the MC's are traveling from the outer edge of the galaxy to somewhere closer to the core to rescue a couple of kids stranded on a late middle age tech level alien planet. The MC's find something like what you're talking about on their version of the net and begin sending the information to the primitives. There are elements within the alien ruling class that see the kids as a way to gain tech and weapons that will give them leverage over their enemies.

 

[CupofJoe]

Can anybody point me in the direction of some good novels that play off this idea?

Not Earth based... "King David's Spaceship" [aka "A Spaceship for the King"] by Jerry Pournelle. About a country/planet trying to rescue/steal advanced tech from a planet/people that don't know what it is before someone else works out what is there and stops them.