Foundation and Preparations

At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we are well familiar with the old saying, “When you are busy fighting alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your job was to drain the swamp.” Sometimes, a thing you must do to accomplish your goal takes so much effort, it can seem like you forgot your original goal.

Consider the importance of preserving knowledge, the goal of the Encyclopedia Foundation. How do you do that? You make a plan. But here’s the funny thing, you know just where the “knowledge” is, in the 21st century it is everywhere and freely available, it’s the “preserving” you don’t have.

So you start working on the “preserving”. That can take a lot – and it has. The finding and purchasing of the first house, and its renovation, for starters. But you need a place for the books. A book is no good without a “library” of some sort. Are you ready for the books now? No, you aren’t, the “library” is no good without a “librarian”, so you have to arrange things so that there can be on site maintenance and upkeep and such.

And it helps to have a program that can make the Encyclopedia Foundation financially self-sufficient. So that needs to be worked on, too.

Then, you can start getting books. Had you done so before, they’d be sitting in the rain, or in an abandoned house. But now you can get the books.

But did you notice that “books” and “knowledge” are two different words?

The goal is preserving “knowledge”. In actuality, you may preserve knowledge with a really, really good memory, and passing it on to a young assistant who does the same thing. And for some surprisingly large amounts of knowledge, that can work well. But for the knowledge of mankind, it is not only handier, but essential, that we take advantage of the method of knowledge preservation called “writing”. Such “writings” are put together in “books”. So you need books – not because “books” are your goal, but because they are the means to the end of preserving knowledge.

Seems a silly distinction, but it’s not. If we were only about preserving books – instead of knowledge – then we’d be focusing on how to create a sealed environment that preserves a paper book for ten thousand years. Toss in an Archie comic and you’re done! But recognizing that it’s the knowledge that’s essential, we knew we’d have to take books with knowledge, and transcribe the words in them on to metal plates. That’s a more durable medium, and will allow the words of the original paper books to be preserved for 10,000 years.

But that’s still not enough. If we can say that it’s not the book that’s important, but the “words”, then we must also realize that it’s not the “words” that are important, but the “knowledge” the words represent.

Imagine a book that would solve every problem you have, and help you immeasurably. And now imagine it is in Sanskrit, but that you don’t even know it’s Sanskrit, just that your happiness and safety depend on knowing what it means.

That would be frustrating.

Yet in any project involving the preservation of knowledge, we must realize that when we store that knowledge on metal plates, with written words, that we are still trying to preserve knowledge. Not just metal plates with marks.

It is daunting to realize just how long 10,000 years is and how much can go wrong. It is not just a matter of planning for if civilization has an interruption. For in such a case, the Foundation would still exist, the books would still be there, the knowledge could be shared, and things put back on track. But we must do more. We must plan for in case the Foundation as an entity collapses, too. So that the books will carry on, and be understandable, to anyone who finds them, even if it’s 300 years after a collapse. Or 3,000.

In another article we spoke of the need for a Rosetta Disc with 1,000 of the world’s languages on them, and how we would at least be having language dictionaries of the five major languages of Earth. And we believe that in the next ten thousand years, given trends in “language freezing” that there will always be someone, even if they are a wandering savage, who speaks some form of one of those five languages.

It would seem that then we would be done. But no. What if the savage is illiterate? Another article will explain the choices in some of the books we are preserving, including children’s educational books. But such will do no good if they cannot be read. A third generation post-atomic war savage – to take the dramatic example! – may be a great hunter, but have not ever been taught to read. He knows English, but cannot read it.

So the vault will be very important – it must teach the savage to read the books it preserves. It must let him know the marks on metal mean something, and that he can learn them. And it can leave nothing to chance.

Pictographs are notoriously unreliable. No one looks at a symbol of a bird and thinks “birds fly, that’s an easy way of travelling like a god, travel takes you to distant lands, therefore this symbol means ‘far’!”, but that is about how most pictographs work. Even things as simple as an arrow – well, look at one, do you see how while you see it pointing in one direction, that the three lines are all pointing in the opposite direction? Three being more than one, wouldn’t a reasonable savage believe it was pointing to the left instead of right? If he caught on that it was a directional marker at all…

There are enormous difficulties to this, but they are not insurmountable. How we will surmount them will be detailed in another article. Suffice that you know from this article, that there is more to preserving knowledge than having a book, or any number of books. Much more.

The preparations – the “fighting of alligators” – cannot let us lose sight of the swamp draining job of preserving knowledge. But such “alligators” of preparation do need to be fought and conquered, or the real goal won’t ever succeed. Such work can seem boring and off topic – fixing houses, researching books, researching other time vaults, studying various long term organizations, coming up with esoteric solutions to fabulously unlikely future problems - but it’s all needful.

In fact – essential.