Question by edgar: When our current world civilization experiences another cataclysmic end, what knowledge will survive?
And will knowledge and technology be able to flourish again before animal existence overtakes them, burying them forever?
Will our satellites falling from the skies be witnessed occasionally by millions on the evening news and internet , or by blood cults that seem them as gods returning to earth?
Best answer:
Answer by sham69
a lot of written documents is stored under ground , in salt mines , maybe they will be discovered like the dead sea scrolls , even from the earliest civilization man as always been the master of the beasts , so animals will not over take us ,, when sat elites fall from earth most will burn up on re entry , and there would be no television or internet , theres 1000s of blood cults on earth already , mafia , street gangs terrorists etc etc
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
Well the space probes we lauched into space will survive and the flag planted on the moon will be there pretty much forever but as for what knowledge will survive that is unknowable and any attempt to answer will be pure speculation.
The idea that our global civilisation is doomed and that we will return to a form of stone age is not really a foregone conclusion. Civilisation is well spread across the planet, and therefore should be capable of surviving any likely natural or manmade disaster.
Experience with localised disaster such as earthquake, hurricane, war or firestorm tells us that once the immediate danger is past people do not go on an extended rampage. In all cases, peoples rise to the occasion and assist each other in any way possible. Witness the Marshall plan at the end of WW2, the appeals and international aid extended after the recent natural disasters, and the relief forthcoming during famines. A global disaster if anything would bring out the best in the vast majority of people, not the worst.
As long as a core percentage of civilisation survived then knowledge and technology would survive with it. It is hard to un-invent something once it has been invented.
The blood cults and other images of dark satire that cataclysm are supposed to invoke are largely the effluence of the troubled minds that tend to dwell on these subjects. We would not be here today if society disintegrated under pressure. Violence and despair might shift expensive consumer merchandise these days, but that is more a result of the social isolation and attendant resentment that is engendered by a society where the wealthy minority habitually shafts the worked-out majority.
The biggest danger is that we succumb to the tension that ensues from resource depletion. If our civilisation disappears after it has depleted all the natural resources on this planet, there will be no way for subsequent societies to recover to the level of technology that we achieve today. This suggests that a planet can only ever support one civilisation. Once that disappears after exhausting all the planet’s resources, there can be no more.
Sleep well!
IF there is another ‘cataclysm’ that arrives BEFORE we have the technology to avert it and BEFORE we have colonized other places besides just this one planet, Ironically, probably much less knowledge and technology would survive then was the case for the ancients!
Here’s why…the ancients (because books were so rare and laborious to produce) went to great lengths to preserve their works keeping such knowledge in caves, tombs, well crafted stone buildings that would stand for 1,000’s of years etc. Even their paintings (which was their form of “photography” outlasts todays film or digital photographs!
Today, print is so cheap and electronic print so much cheaper (plus we only build buildings to last a couple hundred years, not 1,000.s) that most of this info would be destroyed in a world wide cataclysm. Electronic info would be immediately wiped out (which is a sobering thought when you consider that in the next 10-50 years virtually ALL of our print, photo, and video info will be electronic (no film, video tape, paper books, printed photo’s).
Add to this another ironic factor…as society becomes more technologically advanced, individuals become less educated and less resourceful! We live in a modern day society that has become so specialized that each individual knows only a tiny piece of the total puzzle needed to hold our technology, environment and economy together. Though this bodes well for ‘efficiency’ and is very resilient to small scale catastrophes, it’s very vulnerable to large scale cataclysms.
Just 50-100 years ago most people knew how to hunt, churm butter (churn butter today? Yahoo’s spell checker doesn’t even HAVE the word “churn” in it’s database!!), grow a crop (without the high tech chemical fertilizers, machines, and irrigation that goes on in modern farming), skin a chicken, butcher a bull…today, except for a very few individuals, we’re lucky if we even know how to COOK this food (much less acquire it) without reviewing the directions on the box!!
50 years ago, if your car broke down, one could ‘tinker’ with it to get it going..today you need a “computer diagnostic” from specialized technicians! Granted, today’s cars are high tech wonders that are relatively much more dependable than their older counterparts, but a single wire coming loose can cripple the whole system and cost $ 1,000+ just to find where the short is! (by a specialized technician with a computer).
A few years back when I was on a business trip in Northern Ontario a severe thunderstorm hit knocking out electric power for the whole town I was in (for 5 days). No electrical power meant no restaurants, no gas (pumps are electronic), no groceries (cash registrers are electronic), no money!! (no ATM’s!), no credit cards (those old mechanical swiping machines are rare antiques now!), the place I was staying at was inaccessable because of downed trees and powerlines laying across the ONLY access road…when the way was eventually cleared, the place issued guests a flashlight and a candle (no meals available!).
Luckily, I’m a bit old fashion in some ways…when traveling I always kept an emergency cash stash..I immediately grabbed some (non perishable) food items at a grocery store (that didn’t require any cooking!) and paid for it within 20 minutes of the blackout (that’s how long their cash register reserve batteries were good for), found a gas station with an emergency generator (had to pay CASH), found a SINGLE roadside outside burger / icecream place rushing to sell off there perishable food (cooking on gas grills) which made for the last ‘hot’ meal available, slept the night with my flashlight by my bedside, and got the H-LL out of dodge early next morning!
But in a global cataclysm, there would have been no escape…and yes we can survive a week without power, even a few months, as long as there are surrounding areas still with power to keep the grocery stores stocked etc. But a global power outage? We’d be in big trouble very quickly! And no internet to help us out or even communicate!
> another cataclysmic end
_Another_ cataclysmic end? You mean it has _already_ ended? What a weird world you must live in!
The new dominant species will be the insects, which will be the size of small children and only interested in procreation, not in knowledge or scholarship.
in short, what existed before we perished will exist again.
Depending on how big a problem we run into, most of what we learnt will be found, which would mean that there would be some other parts of the world that are living as once the area we find ourselves in, that got the fringe treatment from where the event started.
If no one survived, the planet earth would have to wait for the dust to settle, so that the sun rays could start us back on the road to development.
Most of what we see today will once again flourish until the next event.
Given the education exhibited by these ”end-of-the-world” questioners, I despair of any of our knowledge surviving past the next decade. No cataclysm necessary – just self-enforced ignorance and gullibility combined with lack of effort in critical thinking or scientific reasoning.
Sigh…
I pray each night that our conquerors will respect old people and treat us well…