Informational Go-Bag

[Boerseun]

Okay... haven't been around for a while. A loooong while. So, salutations and greeting all around.

 

In any case, down to brass tacks. Here's the scenario:

 

Society is crumbling around you. Your government finally collapse, services are no more, robbery, looting, rape and murder skyrocket as the remnants of (insert your country's name here) slug it out in a bloody and messy way to grab hold of whatever resources are left. Shop shelves are empty, there's no water flowing, electricity is a dream of the past. The military shoot it out amongst themselves as regional commanders claim territories for themselves in the face of zero central authority.

 

You and your partner have seen this coming years ago, and have started preparing for this eventuality. You have collected everything you need to bug out of society (or whatever's left of it) and are ready to roll. One day you start your journey, leaving the crumbling mess of your city behind you. You aim for a quiet spot in the countryside where you and other like-minded people want to ride out the storm and rebuild society.

 

The above is a well-known, familiar scenario 'preppers' throw around. And they all focus on the knives, lamps, flints, tools and other quite necessary trappings that preparing for such an eventuality might entail. But none of them have envisaged the rest of the story:

 

A few months before you 'bugged out', you and your partner have found out that there is a baby on the way. So now you are going someplace rural, disconnected from a non-existent civilization, and are about to bring a human being into the world with absolutely no memory or recollection of anything society was about. Your new lifestyle will be the sum total of your kid's experience.

 

Being the clever person you are, you have purchased a robust laptop, a suitable solar panel and a strong, shock-proof, waterproof, impact-resistant external hard drive. You are extremely careful with your hardware, the durability or longevity of your rig isn't the issue here. What is the issue, is that the drive only has 1 Terabyte available. In the months before you 'bugged out', you had unlimited access to everything on the web. You have decided to assemble a collection of books, pictures, movies etc. to put onto the drive, keeping the 1Tb limit in mind. This would be your 'informational go-bag', info to take along in the face of a societal disaster as described above. You finished your downloads just in time to 'bug out', and are now fully dependent on it.

 

The info on this drive should:

• Contain agricultural info - including animal husbandry, etc. You are obviously going to spend quite a bit of time farming in the new post-apocalyptic world.

• Contain medical info to the point where you could perform basic surgery. You won't be able to see a doctor anytime soon.

• Contain educational material, from 1st grade level to 12th grade. Practical university-level subjects like engineering etc. could be included.

• Range as wide as possible - to the best of your knowledge, your drive might be the only one in existence and be the only source from which the entire future human civilization will be rebuilt. (This is a fantasy scenario, remember)

 

So here's the gist of it. If you only had access to 1Tb of storage, and your success in surviving without any access to society depends on it, as well as the education of any children you might bring into the world, what would you do? What would you put on the drive? Would it really be possible to fit the essence of the human experience on this planet (so far) into 1 Tb?

 

Obviously, the bullet points I've mentioned above need a lot of expansion and additions. And that's where you come in. What I'm really after, is specifics. Are there particular university courses you might find essential? Would the whole syllabus on mechanical engineering outweigh astronomy, if the two had to compete for space on the drive? Would practical matters like carpentry outweigh philosophy, if it came to that? It all depends on what size they are, I suppose. But we won't know until we start discussing. So, there you go... discuss!

[Boerseun]

Leaving philosophical matters aside, I guess one of the first priorities would be to set aside sufficient space for the necessary software to make the rig run. You might just run into a stray laptop or computer somewhere that someone left behind in the rubble, allowing you to duplicate your info, making your 1Tb of data more accessible to any survivors you might meet. This is essential, as the more copies you can make, the more redundant your hardware would be.

 

So, I would leave aside 1Gb for an ISO image of a sturdy, robust OS like Ubuntu Linux, or whatever blows your whistle, and then another 50 or so Gb for the necessary PDF readers, Ebook readers (like MobiReader), media players, office software including text editors and spreadsheets. Let's call it 50Gb in total for purely practical things like essential software. This could be trimmed down later to make more space as we approach the 1Tb limit, and as we have more insight into what's important and what's not. But that, then, leaves us with 950Gb for the rest.

 

Feel free to add to the list! I'm actually going to do this, and have set a 1Tb drive aside for this experiment. What should I fill it with?

[CraigD]

Okay... haven't been around for a while. A loooong while. So, salutations and greeting all around.

Very good to see you! It has been a while. I can’t resist saying it: the cows have at long last come home ;)

 

So here's the gist of it. If you only had access to 1Tb of storage, and your success in surviving without any access to society depends on it, as well as the education of any children you might bring into the world, what would you do? What would you put on the drive? Would it really be possible to fit the essence of the human experience on this planet (so far) into 1 Tb?

I believe so. 1 TB is a lot of storage!

 

For example, uncompressed, all of the text (including links, excluding graphics, excluding page change history) in Wikipedia totals, by my quick estimation, around 75 GB (0.075 TB). According to the Wikipedia section How much storage is required for a copy of the English Wikipedia?, the size of all of the images used in articles, uncompressed, totaled about 420 GB.

 

If you’re not primarily concerned with performance, you could improve this using file compression. Any NTFS file system can have compression enabled with a few command line or GUI button clicks, giving about 17% whole disk compression, but with more effort, you should be able to set something up using individual file compression to get about 75% compression for mostly text files, making a 1 TB storage device effectively 4 TB.

 

Real-world, right now, I’d be tempted to not limit myself to 1 TB, but 2. Right now, you can buy a 2 TB, USB powered, cellphone-size mechanical (2.5”, usually) drive for less than US$200, usually only a little more than similar 1 TB models. Considering the bigger picture you paint, though, I have second thoughts about mechanical drives and external ones, both.

 

Being the clever person you are, you have purchased a robust laptop, a suitable solar panel and a strong, shock-proof, waterproof, impact-resistant external hard drive.

Since you want your system to be rugged, though, external drive, or mechanical ones, seem bad ideas to me. No matter how tough a laptop case is, it’s USB socket are fragile, and major dirt and liquid entry points to the machine’s innards. So I’d go with an internal drive, and a solid state one.

 

Though SSDs at present are a more expensive than their mechanical counterparts, and most are smaller than for your needs, I found one 1 TB SSD on the market now – a Samsung SSD 840 Evo. I’ve seen adds for them for around $650.

 

SSDs are not only sturdier, they use less power than mechanical ones, which if you’re getting all you power off-grid, you’d likely come to be thankful for. They are, of course, much faster – that’s their major marketing point now.

 

You have decided to assemble a collection of books, pictures, movies etc. to put onto the drive, keeping the 1Tb limit in mind. This would be your 'informational go-bag', info to take along in the face of a societal disaster as described above. You finished your downloads just in time to 'bug out', and are now fully dependent on it.

I’d put Wikipedia on it, for a start. Some other wikis, too.

 

Movies, I’d get and keep some favorites on their original DVD or Blu-ray media, not on my main laptop’s storage. If at all possible, I wouldn’t use the laptop to watch movies, but use a single-purpose DVD/Blu-ray machine.

 

Music, I’d keep on CD and SD cards, and, as with movies, listen to with a single purpose machine, and get a bag full of little SD-card slotted music players to play them – again, keeping them off my laptop other than for editing and mixing.

 

For how-to-info, I’d get some do-it-yourselfer guides, which can usually be bought on CD/DVDs in stores that sell the stuff you’d do it with – hardware stores, marine stores, garden stores, etc. Having them on molded optical media (rather than burned) is a plus, to, because, especially for the thicker DVDs, as long as they’re not scoured or broken, these media are practically immortal.

 

So now you are going someplace rural, disconnected from a non-existent civilization, and are about to bring a human being into the world with absolutely no memory or recollection of anything society was about. Your new lifestyle will be the sum total of your kid's experience.

Here, I think, is the hard part – a small community having a working computer that can read all the stuff collected 10+ years after its isolation from the factories that manufactured their technology. I, and I expect most of our readers over 16 years old have witnessed the failure of a key part of a personal computer, especially high-use, high-power mechanical parts like CD/DVD burners.

 

I have a ca. 1980 Z80A-based, audio cassette-storage computer that still runs flawlessly.

 

Consumer – and, following it, practically all computer technology – has followed market demand to produce computers and computer peripherals that are very fast, but as a consequence very high-power, hot, and less long-lived than those of 30 years ago. Though it would not be difficult to manufacture a PC (as in “personal computer”, not the Wintel technology/brand family), capable of running a HTML5 capable browser viewing 1+ TB storage, practically, I think even an accomplished PC builder would find it difficult to do with the hardware available on the market now. Many embedded systems are very low-power, robust, and architecturally simple, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has built a “bug-out” (or, perhaps more accurately “live for generations without a semiconductor factory” PC out of them. Or perhaps this has been done, and a bit of internet search –fu is all that’s needed to find it.

 

The OLPC folk have a keen interest in rugged, long-life, low-power computers (and something of an obsession for getting rid of any holes in their cases :)) . That might be a good place to start. Upon reflection, it strikes me that their goal of educating and uplifting the 3rd world isn't much different than yours of educating kids in a post-apocalypse, so it might be an ideal place to start, for everything.

[phillip1882]

for philosophy, i highly recommend Stefan Molyneux book, universally preferable behavior.

you can find it for free on his website, freedomainradio.com.

i also recommend his book, practical anarchy.

for engineering, i recommend to get at least the basics, so the wesite http://opensourceecology.org/

has some great stuff.

for mathematics, i recommend having an abacus for grades 2-7, and a slide rule for 7-11. book wise definitely get Euclid's geometry, and teach around the 7th grade.

[SaxonViolence]

I saw some speculation on a Survival forum and added my own.

 

Folks were talking about:

 

A.} Salvaging an old Hard Drive.

 

{This was back when they were just introducing 200-300 Gigabyte Hard Drives.

 

And stand alone Hard Drives were just catching on.

 

I believe I'd rather have a new one for the extra capacity over what a salvaged one would likely offer.}

 

B.} A Salvaged Ipod or one of those electronic tablets.

 

Get them at yard sales for very little once they're dated.

 

C.} A roll-up Solar Panel or two.

 

{A Kindle or Nook might work, but you'd want to totally disable any WIFI Capacity. It just might give you away if folks were being pursued.}

 

Step 2

 

D.} Your Gadget might come in for some very hard knocks;

 

AND,

 

E.} You might want to harden it against EMP

 

Being a reasonably good Welder, I'd make a custom box out of something like 1/8" or 3/32" plate steel with strap hanging swivels without.

 

It would also be richly lined with the best shock absorbing substances that I could find.

 

No, it might not stop a full-powered rifle bullet...

 

Actually, it very well might, but the interior mechanism would be penetrated and ruined.

 

But it would be proof against any sort of falling on.

 

Seems useless to package more info than could reasonably be printed onto paper during the lifetime of the device.

 

That's my 3 cents worth.

 

 

Saxon Violence

Edited October 5, 2013 by SaxonViolence

[Boerseun]

Hi there Craig! I see nothing's changed - you're still the go-to guy for elaborate, detailed replies. Kudos!

 

As far as the hardware is concerned, I did mention in the OP that hardware longevity or durability isn't the issue here. Let's assume that you stumble across a few drives every now and then, in abandoned homes, shops and offices. You copy your data over to them, improving the reliability of whatever you have. The scenario I've sketched might be a bit bleak - let's just say the essence of the story is how well society can recover if all the terabytes of info at society's disposal is forced through a 1Tb bottleneck. If you have to percolate everything we have and distill it down to 1Tb, how well will society recover, and what would you deem essential?

 

Wikipedia, I like that idea. 420Gb for the entire English version of it? There's more than 4 million English articles, that boils down to 105kB per article, or thereabouts, so I guess it's well within the realm of possibility. However, the entire internet will be gone like yesterday's lunch, so none of the links will work. I think it's a good idea, though, but with a low priority. In other words, 420Gb of our hypothetical 1Tb will be set aside for an English copy of Wiki, but if any material written by accredited professionals which is complete and not link-reliant becomes available and we're pressed for space, Wiki would probably be the first to go. But for the time being, that leaves us with 530Gb after subracting 50Gb for essential software to rebuilt any found machines, and 420Gb for Wikipedia.

 

Phillip, great call on the slide rule. I think that's probably one of the first things you should teach your kids if you really want to prepare for a life as envisioned in the OP. So, data-wise, a good, in-depth, detailed computer document on the workings of a slide rule will be essential. If you know of any, bring it on! I like the opensourceecology linkage - good stuff!

 

Saxon, thanks for chipping in your 3c's. Although I don't want this thread to become bogged down in the specifics of any hardware-related issues, I know that attempting to take a flimsy 1Tb drive through any imagined 'end-of-civilization' scenario would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. Let's simply assume that you've assembled the rig of your choice that made it through, and whilst all other data was destroyed, society has to rebuild itself on the 1Tb that you were able to secure. How you did it is another matter entirely, but the end question stays the same - WHAT would put on that 1Tb?

[CraigD]

I’ll reiterate: 1 TB is a lot of storage!

 

To put it in perspective, let’s define a “well-read” person as someone who reads about 1 average length book a day. An average book is 300 pages, a standard page is 1800 characters. Let’s say a well-read person starts reading at that rate at age 10, and stops upon death at age 90. 300 x 1500 x 365 x 80 = 15,768,000,000 characters. Assuming 1 byte per characters, that could be stored in a bit less than 15 GB. Divide 1 TB by that, and you get about 67..

 

So 1 TB can store what 67 well-read people so specialized that none of their reading overlaps read in their entire lives. I’ve likely exaggerated by definition of “well-read” (I think of myself as pretty well-read, and I read at at best about 20% that rate), and they is actually a lot of overlap in reading, so the true number of people who’s lifetime reading could be stored in 1 TB is about that of the faculty of a medium size university.

 

Grabbing some “how big is…” data from the first webpage I found with a decent collection, http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/How-many-bytes-for, and a couple I just know off the top of my head:

• Reduced to text, the entire US library of congress is estimated to be about 10 TB. So 1 TB can, arguable, store about 10% of all the text there practically is.
  
• 1 m of shelved books is about 100 MB. So 1 TB is equivalent to about a 10 km long shelffull.
  
• An industry standard Blue-Ray disk holds about 50 GB. A moderately avid Netflixian like myself watches perhaps 10 of these a month, so 1 TB would only last about 2 months.
  
• A reasonably compressed yet good-quality audio recording of a typical song is about 1 MB
  
• A short novel is about 1 MB
  
• A good-quality color image is about 2 MB (while the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” may be true, a good-quality picture costs about 200 times that is storage)
  
• A low-quality color image, or a monochrome one, is about 100 KB
  

The moral of this calculus, I think, is to be promiscuous in collecting text, selective with images and audio (famous works of art and good scientific diagrams yes, the entire graphical contents of LOLCats, no) and very frugal about movies.

 

So here’s my rough plan:

• Store the text of very book you or someone you respect has read and thinks valuable
  
• Store Examples of the major kinds of visual art in high-resolution color, then fill out the rest with low-res images from the the accompanying pictures of a some good art history and appreciation books
  
• Store recording of the music you love – a few hundred songs at most – at the highest compression you can bear. Store a few of the most beautiful at low enough compression a listener can understand the beauty you hear in them.
  
• Store some good-quality still images of the most striking frames of famous and favorite movies, and store the rest in as low a quality as possible that can be watched and understood
  

I’m pretty sure this plan could store everything important to a single or a small community of people on a 1 TB storage device.

 

I’m uncertain where I stand on video games. I think there an important part of the last half century of our culture’s art history, and would be saddened if my descendents never experienced them, especially ones made in the past 5 years. Newer VGs take a lot of storage, though – about the same 50 GB as a Blu-Ray movie, so fall under my general “very frugal” rule.

 

I’d certainly archive many or all of the old ones that can run under MAME or a similar emulator, as they storage needed is tiny – a few MB or so – and a good engine like Unreal, an editor, and some examples. Perhaps it’s best if our descendents build their own games. Regardless of whether civilization collapses of not, they likely will, anyway.