The question we will be best served by addressing is how to retain the volumes of information our species has accumulated in non-perishable formats. A severe population will eventually come, and it will arrive through some combination of famine, disease, warfare, and (eventually)astronomical impact. So what we’re looking for is not just the means to keep warm in the woods, but a means of capturing and storing vast amounts of useful information and discovery in such a way as to allow them to be accessed and harnessed by the relatively small contingent of remaining humans, post-correction.
The implication which this rests on is that those who remain will stand the best chance of perennial survival if they are bright enough to use their intelligence to dictate the terms of the developing societies. Simply repeating the emotionally enticing structures currently in place will only perpetuate the problem. Intentionally allowing evolution to maintain the integrity of the population, acceptance of the harshness of reality, and insistance on adherence to empirical evidence will be absolutely necessary if we are to survive here long enough to escape this planet eventually. And given the inevitability of solar collapse and asteroid impact, escaping the planet is an eventual necessity, let there be no mistake. We will need to engineer the surviving population in such a way as to enable access to current scientific knowledge and the capacity to build on it. Intelligence, free of the burden of religious restriction, is our only chance at long-term survival. And the sooner we begin to deal with the ugliness which our situation truly displays, the sooner we will begin to make serious progress.
I participated in a real life forum, where they categorized knowledge (which, I recognize, is different from intelligence, but bear with me) into three concrete sections.
The things we know we know. i.e. I know how to tie a square knot
The things we know we don’t know i.e. I know that I would totally blow at brain surgery
and the things we don’t know we don’t know i.e. … hahahah! and that’s my response.
What we can know is a funciton of our intelligence.
I think the best way to promote and preserve intelligence is to not let people become vegetarian, or find a way to get them on the same evolutionary track as the meat eaters (hey, maybe this science will be proved wrong, but as it stands, they say our meat-eating made us smarter).
we have BILLIONS of years to engineer survival beyond solar collapse. So, I get what you mean, that there is this much larger ‘survival’ timeline than exists between you and me, or my grandmother and my grandchild. But in order to move forward, we have to start with the center, and work our way out.
Having our center knocked out from under ourselves, it’s hard to imagine beyond hunting and gathering.
How do we set up our distance relatives, to have the tools they will need in billions of years? Starting right now, with good diet, spending our time in healthy ways, and encouraging and fostering modes of creativity. Allowing people to have their way, any way, as long as it is THEIR way, and not the way of a corporation, or another large entity, will go a long way in making technology more subtle.
Have you heard that a single carbon nanotube is all that is need to transmit and receive and modulate!!! radio signals? Isn’t that amazing?
We often think of the future as this place that is waaay more complex, but with breakthroughs like this, I believe it will become more simple.
DOn’t you think in thousands of years, we will find organic methods to reproduce everything that took entire factories?
I think the preservation and continuation of scientific discovery is the providence of those who are interested. I believe that scientific discovery should always press on for this very reason, simple answers to complex problems.
Which is the point of going paleo, of rewilding, that is, to find simple answers to complex problems. Sure, we aren’t building nanofarms yet, but once we get really good at becoming wild, and we have more and more free times on our hands, people who have one Way about them or another will have the freedom to pursue. And as you know, humanity itself is a pursuit.
It took only a few hundred years, a few decades, to make quantum leaps, even while people were making themselves sicker and sicker. Imagine what societies, well fed, and in optimum health, treating each other well, can accomplish?
I think with a billion or so people in the world(if you notice, one billion is the pre-j-curve population of humanity(that is, before refrigeration), with new ways of communicating, we can out do the accomplishments of the last few hundred years in much less time.
I go back to what I said in the very beginning. 99.9999 percent of all things are what we don’t know we don’t know. There is no emergency, as long as we don’t stop eating meat (hahahah!), and I believe, our current state of ‘knowledge’ could be recreated in a generation, from basic observation, and the tools that we will be inevitably surrounded by.
We need to find a way to work our Ways into everything, even in becoming Wild.