Writing after a brief sabbatical. Was too occupied with a lot of other things at work & home. Still am. The subject for this post was the result of a casual topic in a discussion.
Think of the end of the world, as we see it now. Say some tera-tera watt (or whatever ) electro-magnetic pulse struck earth, or somebody instrumented it. Or say a nuclear device annihilates 90% of mankind. Everything is destroyed. What now ? Resurrection & recontruction.
The techies out of the people that are left begin reinventing the wheels. The people of traditional engineering backgrounds start making things from whatever materials are available. They make wheels, bicycles, buildings, even electricity. With some forging, casting & assembly even a decently educated guy can rebuild a internal combustion engine. And this part of our scientific evolution can be rendered to use within a small time span.
But what about computers !! We can't resurrect them that easily, being a very complex symbiosis of hardware and software. Making something like a micro-processor will take ages. Writing a basic OS on it will take a few more decades !! And offcourse we will need to have geniuses like Moore & Rithcie around. Think about it. We dont have enough technology & intelligence to resurrect our current state of technological evolution after everything is grounded.
Now i can understand why people like Carl Sagan and others would have thought of things like sending information filled to outer space & burying them below New York.
But this is really a serious issue. If at all something like this happens to mankind we will not only vanish without a trace, our descendents that are left would spend eons in redundancy. And what am i doing about it. I am documenting this fact, here :P
Category [ _Tech_ ]
Think of the end of the world, as we see it now. Say some tera-tera watt (or whatever ) electro-magnetic pulse struck earth, or somebody instrumented it. Or say a nuclear device annihilates 90% of mankind. Everything is destroyed. What now ? Resurrection & recontruction.
The techies out of the people that are left begin reinventing the wheels. The people of traditional engineering backgrounds start making things from whatever materials are available. They make wheels, bicycles, buildings, even electricity. With some forging, casting & assembly even a decently educated guy can rebuild a internal combustion engine. And this part of our scientific evolution can be rendered to use within a small time span.
But what about computers !! We can't resurrect them that easily, being a very complex symbiosis of hardware and software. Making something like a micro-processor will take ages. Writing a basic OS on it will take a few more decades !! And offcourse we will need to have geniuses like Moore & Rithcie around. Think about it. We dont have enough technology & intelligence to resurrect our current state of technological evolution after everything is grounded.
Now i can understand why people like Carl Sagan and others would have thought of things like sending information filled to outer space & burying them below New York.
But this is really a serious issue. If at all something like this happens to mankind we will not only vanish without a trace, our descendents that are left would spend eons in redundancy. And what am i doing about it. I am documenting this fact, here :P
Category [ _Tech_ ]
1 comment:
Did u mail to the site (the ad had come some 4-6 yrs back) where they were gonna to store the mails sent in some digital format n build capsules to envelop them. Then these capsules would be dumped deep into the grnd frm where the generation after the end of earth will be deciphering it.
I missed it.. :(
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