TL;DR
Placing kits with helpful tools and information around the world in order to improve the chances of civilization recovery in the case of a 99.999% to 99.9999% population decrease (approx. 100K to 10K individuals alive).
Goals
- Increasing chances of survival and successful civilization recovery
- Preserving human knowledge
- Enabling making contact quickly with more humans
Operations
- Kits will be placed in well known places (e.g. libraries, museums, public transport stations, etc).
- Items in the kit will be updated every X years (this will be funding bottlenecked)
Funding / Business Model
Option 1: Use EA funding
spread kits around the world
Option 2: Sell the kits
- Maybe explicitly say something like “for each kit you buy, we’ll put another kit somewhere else in the world”.
- Maybe sell a subscription where we send updates to existing kits periodically.
Open Source
- Kit specification with all contents be publicly available and open source
- A guide for making your own kit will be available
What will be in the kit?
Epistemic status: Initial idea exploration
These kits could include (incomplete list):
- Information / Knowledge
- Paper copy of Wikipedia
- Paper map with more recovery kit locations
- Tools
- Manual electrical generator (e.g. with a hand crank)
- Laptop with useful things:
- Offline copy of Wikipedia
- Select scientific textbooks
- Important open source projects
- Linux kernel
- Math libraries
- Scientific software
- Offline world map
- Ability to replicate laptop contents to other
lootedfound computers
- Radio transceiver
- Maybe with instructions to extend range
- Extras
- Some candy to lighten the mood?
- A collection of zombie games to “lighten the mood”
Side Notes
What about security / vandalism / premature looting?
A naïve solution (and which can probably be improved) is locking the box as long as there’s electricity. If you care about the security of this, more ideas welcome
More Operation Stuff
- Kit updates are “append only” for existing kits
- Digital content updates will be sent on physical media
- Tools will be sent with a courier
- The boxes may have an “insert only” opening to allow these updates without opening to box
More About Goals
- This project is a bit different from previous discussions. I don’t want to be too opinionated about “How to recover”, the primary goal is knowledge preservation and let people figure out what to do with it.
- This project is not aimed to help in all kinds of catastrophes.
Call To Action
- Help me figure out how impactful this might be
- Fix critical flaws in this idea
- Open this project yourself and I’ll help with all the engineering
- Convince me I should lead this project
- (Maybe partner with me about this?)
Less Important call to action
- Suggest updates to this list with other useful things
P.S. this idea came to me in a dream a few days after EAGx Berlin 2022, not sure what to do about that 🙃
ALLFED is currently putting together a disaster response guide and collecting a few existing compendiums of civilization starter libraries, very similar to this proposal.
Curious what you're referring to here and if there's any publicly available information about it? Couldn't find anything in ALLFEDs 2020 and 2021 updates. (I'm trying to estimate the cost-effectiveness of this kind of project as part of my work at Rethink Priorities)