How best to preserve knowledge...

How best to preserve knowledge...

Postby Billy » Tue Sep 02, 2014 7:45 pm

I'm thinking the Old School is the Best School...

Sheepskin or goatskin parchment, suitably bound and stored properly, will last almost indefinitely. We have books that are many, many hundreds of years old - several examples are thousands of years old. 4,600 years ago, the Egyptians used parchments to record their writings (before they invented papyrus) and we still have them. The Lindisfarne Gospels - the oldest illuminated example of the gospels - are 1300 years old.

Because languages change over time, we would need some sort of Key to go with anything written down so that future generations could understand what we were trying to tell them. Also a primer in both mathematics and chemistry might be a good idea. I'm thinking of someone down the road a couple hundred years - intelligent as we are, but illiterate - using the books to learn from scratch...

Because books of this type - leather bound parchment with actual wooden boards - will be large and bulky, we'd need someplace to store them that would be relatively stable re: temperature and humidity... sort of a Skellig Michael... with people dedicated to preserve them.
“Life is slavery if the courage to die is absent.” - Seneca
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