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It is also worth pointing out that there are likely well over a billion people on earth who currently don’t interact with formal economies or technological society at all.  They will be very well adapted to a post collapse world, you should find some and make friends.  They will likely be far more helpful than a manual on restarting the internet, because they know how to gut a deer.

Over the years these proposals have been in different forms; create a book, set of books, stone tablets, micro-etched metal disk, or a constantly updated wiki.  I really like the idea of creating such a record, in fact the Rosetta Disk project was our first effort in this direction.

atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements.  That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain.  If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.

It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.

Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.

This week President Obama laid out his plan for the future of NASA.  It includes a large budget increase, a push to hand off orbital space flight to private companies, the design of new propulsion systems, and included the long-term goals of landing on an asteroid, going to Mars, and even pushing beyond that.  The national press and political reaction has been interesting to watch from a perspective of long-term thinking.  While there has always been a general agreement that we want to achieve these goals, the administration is taking heat from the press and both sides of the isle for looking “too far out.”

I think this is one of the first cases I have seen a political figure chastised explicitly for thinking too long-term.

n asteroid or comet impact on earth is the only serious threat to human (and nearly all lifes) existence, yet we spend basically no part of NASA’s budget trying figure out how we might avert such a disaster

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists.

A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do).

“Middle-aged people – like me – often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

On the other hand, French postmodern philosopher Jean Beaudrillard contends that Fukuyama’s modernist theory is no more than an illusion caused by our particular relationship with time. He writes that contemporary civilization has simply “lost” its sense of history:

Among paleontologists, it's sometimes called the "Great Dying." Roughly a quarter of a billion years ago, 90-95 percent of all life on Earth died out. It took 30 million years for the planet to recover. What happened?

The era before the Great Dying - also known as the Permo-Triassic Extinction - is called the Permian, and it was a time of rapid animal evolution, including mammal-reptile hybrids called synapsids that looked sort of like giant lizards - some even had big sails on their backs.

there were actually three die-offs during the Permian, but the one at the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic, 250 million years ago, was extreme.

While Ötzi wore the oldest known leather shoes prior to this discovery (his were grassy socks held together with straps of bear and deer leather), 7,420-year-old sandals made from plant material were previously found in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri. The newly discovered lace-up moccasin is thought to narrowly pre-date the first known slip-on shoe, which is 4,680 radiocarbon years old.

Talk about vintage footwear—an international team of archeologists has discovered the world's oldest leather shoe.

From obesity to chronique fatigue syndrome, jihadism to urban ennui, the costs of civilization are becoming ever more apparent. Spencer Wells explores adapting to a world where accelerating change is the new status quo.

Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals.

With the world's first complete sequencing of a brown algal genome, an international research team has made a big leap towards understanding the evolution of two key prerequisites for higher life on Earth - multicellularity and photosynthesis.

The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.

Just how do we get from the quantum world of empty space and invisible energy to the concrete, orderly world that we perceive with our senses? We might now have an answer, and it would make Charles Darwin proud.

He asserts that both male humans and chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are "natural warriors" with an innate predisposition toward "coalitionary killing," which dates back to our common ancestor.

"Chimpicide," Pinker wrote in his 2002 bestseller The Blank Slate the Modern Denial of Human Nature, "raises the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture, prepared us for violence."

The interviewed experts don't expect to be any more able to understand clouds and the other uncertainties by 2030—even if funding for such research were tripled in the next 20 years. That matches real world results, since the experts interviewed back in the 1990s were just as uncertain about clouds and the like as when re-interviewed in the 2000s. Or, as climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the experts interviewed this time and last, told me last year: "We don't know much more than we did in 1975" about climate sensitivity.

Recent findings—such as that life seems to be everywhere on Earth—have encouraged scientific inquiries into the nature of life’s beginnings, said Szostak.

Two critical needs for life are to create a membrane, which defines a boundary that can contain genetic material, and to replicate. Szostak said it is relatively easy to create a membrane from fatty acids that could have arisen in conditions that mimic early Earth; fatty acids, mixed in water with a little salt, readily create closed structures called vesicles.