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Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

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Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#22

If multiple terabytes, you can store a lot of information. All Wikipedia is only 21.23 GB compressed as of 21 September 2022. The English Books from Gutenberg Library are around 40GB. With 1TB, you have already a pretty solid base to rebuild civilization. Then you can go deeper: As of last year, all Library Genesis for nonfiction is 40 TB and Scientific Papers are 78.5 TB. Total Library Genesis seems to be 220TB. Fin…

Great list. Perhaps a stupid question - does that Wikipedia number include photos? If not, what kind of overhead does that add?

That would be the Wikidata Wikicommons dataset. It's 375 TB (source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q565 ). Including also audio, etc...

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#23

If multiple terabytes, you can store a lot of information. All Wikipedia is only 21.23 GB compressed as of 21 September 2022. The English Books from Gutenberg Library are around 40GB. With 1TB, you have already a pretty solid base to rebuild civilization. Then you can go deeper: As of last year, all Library Genesis for nonfiction is 40 TB and Scientific Papers are 78.5 TB. Total Library Genesis seems to be 220TB. Fin…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great list. Perhaps a stupid question - does that Wikipedia number include photos? If not, what kind of overhead does that add?

That would be the Wikidata Wikicommons dataset. It's 375 TB (source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q565 ). Including also audio, etc...

Thanks. That makes me feel silly...I had no idea so much media existed on Wikipedia, nor that it had enough text to fill that many GB alone.

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#26
post #24

Books on Fishing, Foraging, Farming, Carpentry, Mechanics, Electricity, Engineering, Project Zomboid has taught me. I would probably add a few compendiums on Computers/Computing, Philosophy, History of the World, Art, Geology and Astronomy.

Good list. Reminds me of the plot from The Foundation book where Hari Seldon wants to build a library of all the knowledge that can help build a civilization from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#27
With all the talk about nuclear wwiii I don't blame you for the question. I'd like to point that human connection is more important than any knowledge. If you insist, however, I can point you to a similar story today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33114107

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#28
post #24

Books on Fishing, Foraging, Farming, Carpentry, Mechanics, Electricity, Engineering, Project Zomboid has taught me. I would probably add a few compendiums on Computers/Computing, Philosophy, History of the World, Art, Geology and Astronomy.

Good list. Reminds me of the plot from The Foundation book where Hari Seldon wants to build a library of all the knowledge that can help build a civilization from scratch.

Absolutely! Loved the series, probably good to add them if there was space. I’d probably skip over Religion thinking about it. No religious books and such and just a pretty formal description of the worlds religions that existed.

Instead adding a book on Ethics :) Not sure I know a good starter book on Ethics actually.

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#29
There are two scenarios: a disaster that is bad, but from which humans can recover, and a disaster that ends us. The latter scenario is not entirely pointless: perhaps one day life will evolve again, or aliens will visit, and would it not be good for them to know we were here? It's a civilizational mark carved into the great Tree, "Humans were here." There are several interesting possibilities about how and where such a repository could be stored to survive through longtime, the best bet being the Moon, which is geologically inactive and quite extraordinary body, being large and the same angular size as the Sun as seen from Earth.

How would humans want to be remembered? We might focus on music, art, dreams, stories, philosophy, rather than technology, although that might be included, too. I suspect that zoology and biology would be particularly important, as this is the unique natural bounty of our world, the product of billions of years of Life living and dying.

This makes me want to write a story about how a world war begins over the selection of content of this Grand Time Capsule that kills us off.

Re: Ask HN: What content/knowledge is most important?

#30

If multiple terabytes, you can store a lot of information. All Wikipedia is only 21.23 GB compressed as of 21 September 2022. The English Books from Gutenberg Library are around 40GB. With 1TB, you have already a pretty solid base to rebuild civilization. Then you can go deeper: As of last year, all Library Genesis for nonfiction is 40 TB and Scientific Papers are 78.5 TB. Total Library Genesis seems to be 220TB. Fin…

Great list. Perhaps a stupid question - does that Wikipedia number include photos? If not, what kind of overhead does that add?

English Wikipedia is only about 89GB with pictures included and 46GB without.

You can download here newest version:

https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/

I've maxi version with images on my Pi and it works locally without internet access. I've also backup in a faraday cage.

Then you can explore it using https://www.kiwix.org/en/download/

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