FReeper Help Needed - 5,000 Year Project (vanity)

Yes, I’m serious. Yes, it really is a 5,000 year project. No, I’m not expecting to be around for the whole thing.

Available geological, isotopic and cultural evidence strongly suggests that the Earth goes through periodic disasters. We get a major disaster every 12,000 years with “minor” disasters in the midpoints at 6,000 years.

See the background video here (skip the starting ad and ignore the long expired fundraiser at the end) for information about the 6,000 year half cycle.

The last 6,000 year event was informally called the Noah event, but geological confirmation was then found in Tianchi China, and it is now formally called the Tianchi (or Tian Xi) event in keeping with first discovery place naming convention.

The next major disaster is expected 6,000 years after the Tianchi event, that’s about right now.

No matter what form the ‘final straw’ event takes, be it a solar micronova, a truly high mortality global pandemic, a world war, massive vulcanism, or whatever, it will wipe out enough talent that electrical power and communications worldwide cannot be maintained.

Who or what is left? Since geological traces of named 12,000 year events go back 72,000 years, it’s reasonable to expect they’ve been occurring for a much longer time. We, as a species have survived them all. We’re pretty tough, some of us will survive the next one.

Their descendants are the target audience of this project. When there are enough of them to spur the reinvention of a written language they will be able to recognize the contents as a message, and the learning tools in the archives will enable them to decipher it.

This only requirement from future discoverers, that they have the concept of a written language. The initial capsule will have a picture dictionary and a sounding board to make all 44 English phonemes.

Although we can’t stop the disaster, we can ameliorate some of the effects. We can aid the survivors’ descendants in recovering civilization. We can help them with a post global catastrophe civilization reboot with 30,000 books in a human readable format. Everything from smelting metals, to the horse collar and plow, to crop rotation, to soap and sanitation, to art and culture, to the scientific method, to simple machines, everything from grinding grain, cotton gin, saw mill, machine tools like drills, lathes, etc., all the way up to having a representative democracy and so much more!

Please refer to the full patent here as I go through the steps and reasoning behind them:

The first thing you see is a pyramid. This is a little misleading, when we see a pyramid we think the Great Pyramid of Giza. The project’s pyramids are about as tall as a man, but there are hundreds, maybe a thousand of them.

What started this project? The original idea was to use standard fired red clay construction bricks with laser engraved text into their surfaces. It’s legible and unaided eye readable.
Why brick? The oldest written records known when I started were 5,000 year old Babylonian cuneiform fired clay tablets. Bricks are affordable, available and easy to handle. The original vision was a structure of laser marked bricks with unaided eye readable text. See (FIG. 7). This had a low data density, only a few books in a structure.
Obviously the thing to do with bricks is build something.
Why a pyramid? Pyramids are symbols of permanence. They have a track record of surviving thousands of years. Pyramids don’t fall over. The sloped sides deflect impacts, tornado driven debris, flood waters, etc.
Why so small? The intent is they be discoverable, but not so discoverable they would be targeted in a cultural revolution bent on destroying the past. The 6 foot height is sufficient to hold roughly 30,000 books worth of text on enclosed plates.
Do you really expect people 5,000 years from now to be able to read English? No. I expect them to be able to read their own language and make the leap that they could read this strange writing. I expect them to be able to follow pictographic instructions on how to open the cans. The top can contains a microscope, a projector and a maybe a telescope. It also has plates with large unaided eye readable text and a pictographic dictionary, followed by several plates of primers, and an audible pronunciation guide. See (FIG. 17), it’s got the same audio undulation encoding as the 1905 Edison phonograph patent. Run the enclosed strummer down the grooves as shown in (FIG. 21) and hear all of the phonemes in the English language.

Why 2x2.5 mm pages, why not smaller? The requirement is readable by people in a preindustrial society. There won’t be electron microscopes. We can enclose simple available light microscopes (FIG. 13). The limit of useful optical magnification is 500x, above that you’re only magnifying a blur.
Why the yellow light filter? (FIG.13, #1304) Chromatic aberration. All glass lenses spread the wavelengths of light out and create rainbows around features. This is minimized with complex stacks of different types of glass carefully ground to exactly match curves and glued together. Because the glues are organic the will break down over time and fog the lenses. By limiting the wavelengths we limit the dispersion.
Why pick yellow? It’s near the peak sensitivity of the human eye and has better contrast than the peak green.
Why not color correcting optics that are available off the shelf? Simple few lens construction gives the finders the possibility of making their own microscopes and telescopes, lowering the threshold to independence from ancient artifacts.
What about internal reflections? Another requirement is no coatings that could degrade, flake off or otherwise fail over time. They’re just going to have to live with it until their grasp of technology catches up.
You keep talking about technology, is that all you intend to preserve/resurrect? No. I’m glad you asked. I’m an engineer, and that does affect my presentation. Once again no. The goal is to allow our descendants to live long, healthy, and full lives. I want to armor them with technology for the creature comfort things, but that’s not enough. I want them to know the classic philosophers, the moral lessons from fables, the wonders of the unknown.
I want them to have the ability to reason and to recognize falsehoods, have the spirit of adventure to know the founding documents of our culture, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bible, as well as the works of Shakespeare, and many other plays based on human nature, I want them to see themselves in a Greek tragedy. I want them to look up at the stars and wonder. I want them to read our fiction, know that it is fiction, and appreciate the authors’ imaginations and cultivate their own. I want them to instinctively help others where appropriate, to be good neighbors to all.
I want to jump start them to shave off centuries of avoidable diseases, soil depletion, grinding poverty and dark ages. I want them to practice sustainable agriculture, animal husbandry, industry and promote general well being.
I want them to have great dreams and accomplish great things.

I’ve got a clear picture of how to make an archive that will last 5,000 years. So why do I need FReeper help?

Lots of reasons.

Although I’ve worked for several start-ups, I don’t have the skills to start a start-up or run an organization, nor do I have the connections to woo suitable existing organizations. Some of the questions I have and skills needed include:

Artwork? A cartoonist to make pictographic instructions for one. Library? Suggestions for 30,000 books. Librarians for how to organize them for the ultimate users.
Home schoolers for insight to best ways to get a literate people up to speed when no modern language survives.
Although it is extremely unlikely any current language survives, should there be English to x, y, z language dictionaries?
What books MUST be included?
What books should be explicitly excluded?
What cut off point for technological advances? I think electricity before electronics, up to light bulb, and telegraph hint there is more and let them figure it out for them selves...
Culture? Start with the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians or?
Original language with translations or just the English language versions?
Representatives? Who will market and sell the pyramid kits, etc.?
Data translation, text and other types of files to GDSII for making the plates.
And a hundred other things I don’t even know I don’t know!

(Laz’s update of an old Soviet propaganda poster, and with Free Republic, all things really are possible!)

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