Re: Government/society in post-scarcity interstellar environments

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:04:30 -0700, Crown-Horned Snorkack
<chornedsnorkack@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On 23 okt, 10:52, Eivind Kjorstad <eivindor...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[Preservation of information]

Any one of them can fail. Many of them *will* fail. Will -ALL- of them
fail for LARGE bodies of knowledge ? I don't think so.

It'd take near-extinction of the human race, for example, to make us
forget how to make a solid-state transistor. Roman law may have
been widely copied, I somehow doubt it existed in any number
comparable to transistors today, or texts on how transistors work.
There is atleast 5000 copies of such texts in my city alone, it's
unlikely my city ever had even a -single- written copy of roman law.

Roman pots and tiles did, and still do, exist in numbers comparable to
transistors today.

Uh, just how many pots and tiles did the Romans make?

Because, see, I've got something like a billion solid-state transistors
in my office right now, and I think I'm only mildly above average in that
regard...

There's also the fact that one can go a long ways towards encoding the
recipe for a transistor, into a billion transistors[1]. Writing a text
on pottery-making, onto the side of a pot or tile, is a bit tougher.


[1] OK, pedantically speaking, you'd want a less volatile sort of
memory than the state of a transistor-switched circuit element. But
then I think I could scrounge up a *trillion* bits of non-volatile
storage around here...


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