Comment by rotexo

Some thoughts about making it possible for individual humans to access Wikipedia, robustly to calamities that are within the sphere of human agency.

Seems like you would want it to be stored digitally. Ideally, people would have the ability to access it remotely, in case their local copy is somehow corrupted. For that, you would need a physical network by which the data can be transmitted. Economies of scale would seem to suggest that there would be one or a few entities that would “serve” the content to individuals who request it. Of course, you would want those individuals to be able to access this information without having detailed technical knowledge and ability. I guess they would have pre-packaged software “browsers” they could use to access the network.

In order to maintain this arrangement, you would want enough political stability to allow for the physical upkeep of this infrastructure, including human infrastructure (feeding the engineers who make it all possible). In order to make it worthwhile, you would need people who want to access the information too. I suspect political stability, a sufficient abundance of the necessities for human life, and the political will to make sure that everyone’s needs are met so that they can safely be curious about the world would help here too.

All of this requires sources of power. I suspect that a combination of nuclear power, solar/batteries, and geothermal energy would be sufficient and would avoid the problem of running out of fossil fuels at some point in the future. The nice side-effect here of reducing the impact of calamities exacerbated by the greenhouse effect.

For the information to continue being relevant, you would have to update it with new knowledge, and correct inaccuracies. How best to accomplish this? Well, I guess you would need a systematic way to interrogate the causes behind the various effects we observe in the world. I would propose a system where people create hypotheses, and perform experiments that exclude the influence of as many factors as possible external to the phenomenon being studied. People would then share their findings, and I guess would critique each other’s arguments in a sort of “peer review” to try to come to a consensus. You would have to feed and provide for these people at a certain basic level to make sure they are comfortable and safe enough to continue doing this work. I guess you would want to encourage the value systems compatible with this method of interrogating the world.

Just my 2 cents.