Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 (http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor...), which could knock out power for months or years at a time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20. How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is extremely dangerous.

To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days. We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)

In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them. Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you will be starved before your vegetables are grown.

You know the fun thing about computers and digitization? You can write software to export its data in a way that can be reprinted onto physical paper. I'm not sure if libraries do that, and I'm sure they wouldn't reprint each and every line on separate cards and store them in massive tombs still, but in theory they could have a hardcopy in a few massive binders somewhere. Of course it'll be out of date the instant it's printed, but that's true of old card catalogs too.

You're right. I hope they've done this and that it is kept on site somewhere.

I agree that throwing away the physical books would be stupid, but the index is ready enough to rebuild if we ever need it again. And in a post-computer world search times in the order of days or even weeks would be acceptable: when looking up crop rotations a few days more or less won't make or break your harvest

Rebuilding the index might require actually reading all the books over again. The whole point of an index is that it is 1000x smaller, so it makes absolutely no sense to throw away a paper copy of it.

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