20170722 The element from Reference #1 for focus today is Paragraph 1 on page 17.
This paragraph contains two sentences.
Concurrently with this thread, I am following the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan 497 years ago, the observations of Adam Smith (approximately) 240 years ago, and projections of scenarios for human exploration and settlement of space up to 500 years from now.
Magellan's expedition was state-of-the-art for his time, but the unknowns he faced seem (to me) greater than those that will face humans moving away from Earth 500 years from now, primarily because of advances in remote information gathering that have come about in 500 years, and which will surely be available 500 years from now.
To the scenario posed by Dr. Dartnell, I am becoming increasingly aware that no one individual is going to be able to achieve the understanding and practical skill that would be needed to bring the pages of "The Knowledge" to life.
In Paragraph 1 on page 17, Dr. Dartnell forecasts the scope of "The Knowledge", and concludes with the intriguing concept that "...the book itself contains the genetic instructions for its own reproduction."
In his novel "Aurora", Kim Stanley Robinson considers how a population of (on the order of) 2,000 people might carry (what amounts to) a "torch of knowledge" over 167 years from Earth to a remote location away from Earth. In his vision, Mr. Robinson seems to allow for a remarkable level of human freedom to achieve potential or to live in acceptance of the life on offer.
Mr. Robinson hints at ongoing efforts by older members of the population to find young people coming up, who might be suitable for responsibility at a higher level than the default, and who might be interested in taking on the challenge of education and discipline required.
In thinking about the implications of just the TWO sentences in Paragraph 1, I am inclined to think that Dr. Dartnell has outlined a set of ambitions that would be challenging for a population of several hundred individuals, let alone (for example) a family.
Were Dr. Dartnell's vision for this forum (whatever it may be) to come to pass, I would imagine there would be hundreds if not thousands of individuals committing themselves to preserving small parts of the vast territory of human knowledge.
The latest member of the forum is "Boyce Noun". The Internet fetch for that name reveals what appears to be an interest in metal detector equipment.
It seems to me that the ability to find metal in the environment, and to differentiate it electronically, would be quite useful, whether the environment is the post-apocalyptic one of "The Knowledge", or the simple empty landscape of an unpopulated piece of land on the Earth, or the entirety of the land area of Mars.
However, in the spirit of "The Knowledge", I would point out that it would be helpful for the expert in metal detection equipment to be able to build it from scratch, using atom assembly equipment (which does not exist yet except at the crudest possible level on Earth in 2017), AND to be able to understand and explain every aspect of design and operation of the equipment.
It seems to me that it is (most likely) beyond the capability of a single individual to hold all the required knowledge in mind at one time. A person might be able to maintain "mastery" of a complex subset of knowledge such as this with the assistance of a suitable computer and data repository, but that person would be able to work at a peak level for only a brief time, in some very narrow aspect of the total package. That is indeed how the complex industrial environment we humans have created in recent centuries seems to operate. Because humans have productive lifetimes of only a few decades, the civilization persists because new generations come along, but (I suspect) more importantly, the machinery constructed to build and to maintain complex systems carry those systems forward by sheer momentum.
(th)