I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)
I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)