Hubbert posted:

its gonna be REALLY cool if records management becomes fully digital and we lose the ability to transfer knowledge to future generations after a potential collapse of global industrial civilization

just getting big mad at fancy broken rock + metal mosiacs that we once shot electricity through for the wisdom they contained

Hubbert posted:

now with sound
https://i.imgur.com/c4PwENQ.mp4
(right-click image, unmute)

Stereotype posted:

i'm just going to do the two novelty image probations, so congrats to Popoto and Perry Mason Jar

blue squares posted:

so should I finally stock my garage with emergency rations or is that a fools game

Hubbert posted:

its gonna be REALLY cool if records management becomes fully digital and we lose the ability to transfer knowledge to future generations after a potential collapse of global industrial civilization

just getting big mad at fancy broken rock + metal mosiacs that we once shot electricity through for the wisdom they contained

stumblebum posted:

imagining a post-apoc future where the internet still exists but literally the only means of interfacing with it is via janky-rear end hallucinating LLM ai bots. bonus points if the bots are programmed to require regular crypto payments to function

Hubbert posted:

Stereotype posted:

i'm just going to do the two novelty image probations, so congrats to Popoto and Perry Mason Jar

Hexigrammus posted:

Always a good idea to have a few days worth of something on hand to smooth out the bumps caused by extreme weather, earthquakes, and workers not showing up due to disabling sickness, especially if we get hit by a Fuckitallitis pandemic.

I suggest the lifeboat rations from Costco's Doomster department. They can survive years stored in a lifeboat locker without deteriorating so a car or garage should be no problem. Some of them taste like lemoncake , probably not so good if you need to stretch out your supplies in which case find the ones that taste like cardboard flavoured dog food. The rations expire after 5 years but that might not be a concern where we're going.

gently caress COREY PERRY posted:

it is a normal thing to have ice receed during the depth of winter

Hubbert posted:

its gonna be REALLY cool if records management becomes fully digital and we lose the ability to transfer knowledge to future generations after a potential collapse of global industrial civilization

just getting big mad at fancy broken rock + metal mosiacs that we once shot electricity through for the wisdom they contained

celadon posted:

Hubbert posted:

now with sound
https://i.imgur.com/c4PwENQ.mp4
(right-click image, unmute)

gently caress COREY PERRY posted:

it is a normal thing to have ice receed during the depth of winter

Hubbert posted:

Soggy Muffin posted:

I can see a grim dark future ahead where people worship ancient technology that still works without a grid, like flash lights or something, with no idea how they work. All they know is that they must make sacrifices to the machine God for them to continue to work

Perry Mason Jar posted:

To express additional gratitude, have this nice graph

https://twitter.com/geoffmcfarlan/status/1676829863884324866?s=20

Ah, another lovely graph!

gently caress COREY PERRY posted:

it is a normal thing to have ice receed during the depth of winter

Microplastics posted:

england forgot how to make bricks when the romans left and took their brick making knowledge ("put mud in a square") with them

how we managed to come back from that and take over a quarter of the world is beyond me

Trabisnikof posted:

also it is insane to consider how many things took a long as time to be invented and propagate, like it took until the 12th century AD for homes to get chimneys in england.

we could lose the last 500 years of tech and still have a bunch of incredibly powerful technologies that took thousands of years to propagate the first time. its going to be hard to undo the existence of an understanding of 0 or of pi.

Trabisnikof posted:

sure but that doesn't mean we should assume "those dumb historians never considered it was for socks" when they have, and there are issues with that theory too.

like knitting is estimated to have been invented in the 3rd to 5th century AD and the doohickies are from 2nd to 4th centuries AD.

this is why history is fun to study, you can keep wondering forever on some things.

lol

Hubbert posted:

its gonna be REALLY cool if records management becomes fully digital and we lose the ability to transfer knowledge to future generations after a potential collapse of global industrial civilization

just getting big mad at fancy broken rock + metal mosiacs that we once shot electricity through for the wisdom they contained

celadon posted:

you'll wanna stockpile these, their usefulness cannot be overstated

Soggy Muffin posted:

I can see a grim dark future ahead where people worship ancient technology that still works without a grid, like flash lights or something, with no idea how they work. All they know is that they must make sacrifices to the machine God for them to continue to work

”The Long Descent, John Michael Greer (Pages 182 to 187)” posted:

How Not To Save Science

The tools and technologies discussed so far in this chapter represent one side of the heritage of our industrial and preindustrial past that would be worth saving. Another side, less tangible and thus potentially more vulnerable, comprises the knowledge gathered over the last three hundred years or so of the intellectual adventure of modern science. Now it’s true that some elements of that knowledge might be better off lost — I’m not at all sure the far future really needs to know how to build nuclear warheads or synthesize nerve gas — but on the whole, the heritage of modern science forms one of the great triumphs of our civilization and deserves a shot at survival.

It’s all the more impressive, in an age dominated by the myth of progress, that the challenge of preserving this heritage into the future has already been discussed in scientific circles. Most of that discussion has centered around a proposal made by ecologist James Lovelock in his 1998 essay “A Book for All Seasons.”(16) Lovelock proposed that a panel of scientific experts be commissioned to write a book outlining everything modern science has learned about the universe, forming — in his words — “the scientific equivalent of the Bible.” This book, he urges, ought then to be produced en masse on durable paper, so that some copies make it through the decline and fall of industrial society and reach the hands of future generations.

It’s hard to think of a better proof that most scientists don’t learn enough about the history of their own disciplines — or a better piece of evidence that they need to. A book of the sort Lovelock proposes would be a disaster for science. I don’t simply present this claim as a matter of opinion. The experiment has been tried before, and the results were, to put it mildly, not good.

In the twilight years of Roman civilization in western Europe, as the old institutions of classical learning were giving way to the Dark Ages, Isidore of Seville (560–636) — a Christian bishop and theologian in Spain (who was recently named by the Vatican as the patron saint of the Internet) — compiled a book along the same lines as the one Lovelock envisions. Titled Etymologiae (Etymologies), it was the world’s first encyclopedia, a summary of what Isidore’s contemporaries defined as useful knowledge, and it was a huge success by the standards of the time. (17) The most popular general reference work in medieval libraries, it was still so widely respected when printing became available that it saw ten print editions between 1470 and 1530.

During the Dark Ages, the Etymologiae served a useful purpose as a compendium of general knowledge. Over the longer term, though, its effects were far less positive. Because Isidore’s book quickly came to be seen as the be-all and end-all of learning, other books — many of which would have been much more useful to the renaissance of learning that spread through Europe after the turn of the millennium — were allowed to decay, or had their parchment pages recycled to produce more copies of the Etymologiae.

Worse, the reverence given to Isidore’s work gave a great deal of momentum to the medieval belief that the best way to learn about nature was to look something up in an old book. That same reverence came to be applied to the works of Aristotle and other Greek classics after they were translated from the Arabic, beginning in the 12th century. The resulting conviction that scientific research ought to consist of quoting passages from ancient authorities succeeded in hamstringing natural science for centuries. It took the social convulsions of the 16th and 17th centuries to finally break Aristotle’s iron grip on scientific thought in the Western world and make it acceptable for people to learn from nature directly.

This could all too easily happen with Lovelock’s “scientific equivalent of the Bible.” Like Isidore’s encyclopedia, a modern compendium of scientific theories about the world would inevitably contain inaccurate information — today’s scientists are no more omniscient than those of 50 years ago, when continental drift was still considered crackpot pseudoscience, or 110 years ago, when Einstein and the quantum physicists hadn’t yet proved that the absolute space and uniform time of Newtonian cosmology were as imaginary as Oz. Because the compendium Lovelock imagines would be a collection of knowledge, rather than a guide to scientific practice, it would teach people that the way to learn about nature was to look facts up in a book, rather than paying attention to what was actually happening in front of their noses — and it might well ensure that, in a time that had limited resources for the preservation of books, copies of a book of scientific doctrines could be preserved at the expense of, say, the last remaining copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, or some other scientific classic that would offer much more to the future.

A book of scientific doctrines of the sort Lovelock proposes could also ensure that the most important dimension of science itself would be lost. Science, it’s crucial to remember, is not a set of teachings about the universe, however accurate those might be. At its core, science is a system of practical logic, a set of working rules that allow hypotheses to be tested against experience so that they can be discarded if they’re false. That set of rules isn’t perfect or
flawless, but it’s the best method for investigating nature that our species has invented so far, and it’s worth far more to the future than any compendium of currently accepted scientific opinions.

In his essay, Lovelock imagines a survivor in some postcollapse society faced with a cholera epidemic, equipped with nothing but a book on aromatherapy. It’s a compelling image. What, though, if the survivor has to deal with a new disease — one that hasn’t yet jumped to human beings from its original animal host, let’s say — or an old disease that has mutated into a new form? What if the antibiotics and treatments we use today have become useless due to the spread of antibiotic resistance in microbes? A textbook focused on existing knowledge circa 2008 might not offer much help. Nature is constantly changing. Science as a method of inquiry can keep track of those changes; science as a set of doctrines can’t.

A book that might actually succeed in saving science for the future would be a very different book from the one Lovelock has envisioned. Rather than projecting the infallibility and misplaced reverence that a phrase like “the scientific equivalent of the Bible” suggests, this new book would present the scientific method as an open-ended way of questioning nature, providing enough practical tips and examples to help readers learn how to create their own experiments and ask their own questions. It would treat its readers in the present and future alike as participants in the process of science, not simply consumers of the knowledge it produces. The role of participant is not one that many scientists today are comfortable seeing conferred on laypeople, but if today’s science is going to be saved for the future, getting past that discomfort is one of the first and least negotiable requirements.

Whatever its flaws, though, Lovelock’s proposal has at least had the positive effect of focusing attention on one of the biggest challenges of the deindustrial age — preserving as much as possible of the cultural heritage of the last six thousand years or so. That’s a tall order because nearly all of that heritage is brutally vulnerable to an age of decline. Nearly all books printed in the last century and a half are on high-acid paper, which gradually turns back to sawdust; librarians are already struggling to preserve collections of disintegrating 19th-century books. CDs and DVDs, like other electronic media, have even shorter lifespans; moreover, they won’t even be playable in a low-tech future. During the most challenging parts of the transition to the deindustrial age, when people are struggling to survive on a day-by-day basis, literature, music, art, and science may not rank very high on their list of priorities anyway.

Any effort toward cultural survival, in other words, will demand ruthless sorting. Today’s sprawling libraries will need careful winnowing to sort out collections small enough to be copied by hand if it comes to that. Musical forms that can be passed on as living traditions will be more likely to make it, which means folk music has a better chance than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A huge amount of our present cultural heritage will inevitably be lost; the job at hand is to try to make sure that the best possible selection gets through.

Those cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions that will be sustainable and relevant in a future of modest energy supplies and limited resources belong at the top of the list of what to save. These traditions will be crucial during the crisis periods of the catabolic collapse process, when they will provide desperately needed balance to the grim realities of a disintegrating society. They will be even more crucial in the long term. Just as the creative minds of the early Middle Ages drew much of their inspiration from classical poetry and philosophy that had been preserved by Irish monks through the worst of the intervening years (18), cultural legacies handed down over the decades and centuries to come will form crucial parts of the inheritance on which our successor societies will build.

Hubbert posted:

Jokes on both of us, because I’m a tremendous nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge of both WH40K and modern “doomer” philosophers.

You can even draw parallels between the Cult Mechanicus’s fixation on historical research and recovery (rather than experimentation and scientific exploration), Lovelock’s imagined “Book of All Seasons”, and the historical legacy of Etymologiae in medieval Europe.

This is gonna be a long book quote, but it's nice to go back to my academic roots!

SorePotato posted:

We're nearly at the critical mass of nonviolent demonstrations before the ruling class has a big Come to Jesus moment about fossil fuels. In my expert opinion

Wheeee posted:

you didn’t, the French Normans took over before England accomplished anything

SorePotato posted:

This should be a permaban

Hubbert posted:

finally, I can be free from the somethingawful forums ...

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

The latest Nate Hagens podcast has a Spanish dude (with a thick accent I had to try and concentrate on at times) who was talking about the potential of flat or negative GDP numbers being a turning point globally should they come about and persist for years. I look at the Doomsday Econ thread and think about that drop in France spending money on food and consider that trend beyond a few months.

And then a guy ruins Wimbledon or The Ashes by throwing orange powder about and I think of all the people ringing into Radio 2 and LBC saying they hate them and they should be locked up and left to rot.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

You, like your PFAS and rotifer buddies, are here poimanently.

SorePotato posted:

After 20 years of on and off famine, the US promises to cut emissions by half by the year 2150

celadon posted:

oh sweet i did this one already

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

You, like your PFAS and rotifer buddies, are here poimanently.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

celadon posted:

oh sweet i did this one already

Zeta Taskforce posted:

Looking at prior years, they didn't go up in a straight line either, and they backtrack from time to time too. There are always storms and changing wind patters that move it around. What's not normal is for the ice to be a solid month and a half behind schedule and god knows how many sigmas below mean.