Restoration Vault

Factual Questions
1

Hello, this is my first post here. I hope I am placing this in the proper section just to be sure I will make sure to pose it as a general question.

As I was driving home from work this morning I began to ponder what most consider being inevitable at some point or another, a near extinction event. (Meteor strike, nuclear holocaust, or zombie apocalypse) whatever it may be. Now let’s take a moment to ponder if a few humans survive the event and they are able to create a new civilization from the ashes of the old. Where and how would they start? Would they be required to start from scratch? I guess my main question is this. Is there any contingency plan by any government or private group to create a repository of the collective human knowledge? Everything from basic language and math, to computer science and what we understand of space travel. We have come such a long way from creating fire to warm our caves do we really want to make our descendents start from scratch? If there isn’t said repository are there even plans on the table to consider making one and if there aren’t why not?

P.S. Well it kind of got away from me as a general question but still not sure if it would qualify as a great debate. I will allow the Mods to determine that one.

2

You should read The Mote in God’s Eye sometime, it postulates a species that does this almost pathologically.

For real world examples? The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It tries to store seeds so that, in the event of disaster, humans will have something with which to jump start agriculture.

As for a small band of survivors (say 1,000)? It won’t be enough to maintain a technological society. But skipping the first 500,000 years would be helpful.

3

The challenge may not be the cataloging and preservation of knowledge, but making the existence of that stored knowledge widely enough known so survivors will know that it exists and how to access it.

4

I read once of another problem: Suppose this hypothetical holocaust also involved a massive destruction of all the infrastructure that’s been built. (Roads, dams, buildings, machines, homes, coliseums, everything). It was claimed that we’ve exhausted so much of the world’s resources from which all this was built, that there isn’t enough left to re-create everything we have now.