Resilient ways to archive valuable technical / cultural / ecological information Biorisk and recovery from catastrophe
In ancient Sumeria, clay tablets recording ordinary market transactions were considered disposable. But today’s much larger and wealthier civilization considers them priceless for the historical insight they offer. By the same logic, if human civilization millennia from now becomes a flourishing utopia, they’ll probably wish that modern-day civilization had done a better job at resiliently preserving valuable information. For example, over the past 120 years, around 1 vertebrate species has gone extinct each year, meaning we permanently lose the unique genetic info that arose in that species through millions of years of evolution. There are many existing projects in this space—like the internet archive, museums storing cultural artifacts, and efforts to protect endangered species. But almost none of these projects are designed robustly enough to last many centuries with the long-term future in mind. Museums can burn down, modern digital storage technologies like CDs and flash memory aren’t designed to last for centuries, and many critically endangered species (such as those which are “extinct in the wild” but survive in captivity) would likely go extinct if their precarious life-support breeding programs ever lost funding or were disrupted by war/disaster/etc. At FTX, we’re potentially interested in funding new, resilient approaches to storing valuable information, including the DNA sequences of living creatures. (Filed under “recovery from catastrophe” because it involves archiving and burying stuff, but importantly I think the benefit of resilient cultural/ecological archiving (rather than preserving crucial technical knowledge) is actually larger in best-case utopian scenarios.)
Agreed, very important in my view! I’ve been meaning to post a very similar proposal with one important addition:
Anthropogenic causes of civilizational collapse are (arguably) much more likely than natural ones. These anthropogenic causes are enabled by technology. If we preserve an unbiased sample of today’s knowledge or even if it’s the knowledge that we consider to have been most important, it may just steer the next cycle of our civilization right into the same kind of catastrophe again. If we make the information particularly durable, maybe we’ll even steer all future cycles of our civilization into the same kind of catastrophe.
The selection of the information needs to be very carefully thought out. Maybe only information on thorium reactors rather than uranium ones; only information on clear energy sources; only information on proof of stake; only information on farming low-suffering food; no prose or poetry that glorifies natural death or war; etc.
I think that is also something that none of the existing projects take into account.
Resilient ways to archive valuable technical / cultural / ecological information
Biorisk and recovery from catastrophe
In ancient Sumeria, clay tablets recording ordinary market transactions were considered disposable. But today’s much larger and wealthier civilization considers them priceless for the historical insight they offer. By the same logic, if human civilization millennia from now becomes a flourishing utopia, they’ll probably wish that modern-day civilization had done a better job at resiliently preserving valuable information. For example, over the past 120 years, around 1 vertebrate species has gone extinct each year, meaning we permanently lose the unique genetic info that arose in that species through millions of years of evolution.
There are many existing projects in this space—like the internet archive, museums storing cultural artifacts, and efforts to protect endangered species. But almost none of these projects are designed robustly enough to last many centuries with the long-term future in mind. Museums can burn down, modern digital storage technologies like CDs and flash memory aren’t designed to last for centuries, and many critically endangered species (such as those which are “extinct in the wild” but survive in captivity) would likely go extinct if their precarious life-support breeding programs ever lost funding or were disrupted by war/disaster/etc. At FTX, we’re potentially interested in funding new, resilient approaches to storing valuable information, including the DNA sequences of living creatures.
(Filed under “recovery from catastrophe” because it involves archiving and burying stuff, but importantly I think the benefit of resilient cultural/ecological archiving (rather than preserving crucial technical knowledge) is actually larger in best-case utopian scenarios.)
Agreed, very important in my view! I’ve been meaning to post a very similar proposal with one important addition:
Anthropogenic causes of civilizational collapse are (arguably) much more likely than natural ones. These anthropogenic causes are enabled by technology. If we preserve an unbiased sample of today’s knowledge or even if it’s the knowledge that we consider to have been most important, it may just steer the next cycle of our civilization right into the same kind of catastrophe again. If we make the information particularly durable, maybe we’ll even steer all future cycles of our civilization into the same kind of catastrophe.
The selection of the information needs to be very carefully thought out. Maybe only information on thorium reactors rather than uranium ones; only information on clear energy sources; only information on proof of stake; only information on farming low-suffering food; no prose or poetry that glorifies natural death or war; etc.
I think that is also something that none of the existing projects take into account.