I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a portion of a book by Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky, which describes a unique way that a civilization of interstellar traders, the Qeng Ho, deal with worlds they visit that do not meet their technical sophistication.

To quickly summarize: Imagine you are a member of a race that trades goods across stars. You set a course for where you find it likely to find intelligent life, hoping to find someone to trade good with, but are unsure exactly what you’ll find when you get there. Upon arrival, the intelligent life there hasn’t progressed beyond the bronze age. What do you do?

The answer is simple: You educate them.

In Vinge’s book A Fire Upon the Deep, which takes place in the same universe, he presents a situation where some of the characters are in a predicament, marooned in a pre-technology society with enemies all around. They have only a single line of communication with the technological world, and only a very basic set of tools to work with otherwise. The people that they communicate with must find a way to provide them with actionable instructions that will help them build protective devices from the materials on hand.

With these ideas, I’ve been considering what exactly it might take to build a guide that could explain how to rebuild a technological society from the ground up. The idea being that with enough time and persistence, useful technology could be rebuilt from the ground up within a “short” (over several years, perhaps) period of time.

In Fire, the characters use a vastly complex decision tree to determine what the fastest route to civilization is based on the raw materials on hand. I think if we consider Earth as the place where civilization would need to be rebuilt, we can easily rule out having to build a tree that takes into account a scarcity of materials that are easy to find here. On the other hand it may be useful to be able to rule out finding raw materials based on environment; for example, if you’re in the desert, water might be difficult to come by. Practically, I suppose, the guide would assume that certain quantities of raw materials are available in proportion to their scarcity on Earth.

Similar ideas I’ve found online include solely two other thoughts about rebuilding - survivalism and cultural revival.

There is quite a lot of information about survivalism, which doesn’t appeal to me. Too much has been written about how to build shelters and find food and water that I think it’s unimportant to retread that path. There’s no doubt this information should be included, but in terms of generating something new and useful, there’s no new work to be done here.

From a social point of view, there are even crazy monuments erected to keep future people on the path to enlightenment. I question whether this is the best plan, since it seems like someone trying to foist his worldview on people by burning down society to start over. There are a handful of folks dedicated to creating a better post-apocalyptic society than what we have now. I doubt there would be much success with this.

Some other takes on the idea include the Perenno facility, a place where the world’s knowledge could be archived and protected for future post-apocalyptic use. This brings to mind some other random thoughts that don’t make a lot of sense. I think the problem of information overload becomes tangible to people who have to funnel all the knowledge of the world through a single viewport. Where do you start? I think you need an essential guide; a document with which you can say “Start Here”, whether it refers to external works or not relies on whether the guide is meant to be presented as a whole.

Thinking about this brings to mind the books of Jeanne DuPrau, like The City of Ember, in which the fictional progenitors do a horrible job of explaining anything to their descendants. It seems like we should do better.

I’m amused that I mentioned this concept to Nana yesterday, and the idea of a 10,000-year clock, and her response was, “Why bother? We’ll all be long gone by then.” I suppose I am determined to be more optimistic.