World spec'mode

What will remain of us centuries from now? Millennia? Millions of years? Many people have already asked themselves these questions. In fact, we’re asking them more than ever, given the pressing current events and the growing number of crises that are turning our lives upside down. What on earth will we be able to leave to future generations if the world keeps getting worse and worse? And it’s not just about what we’ll leave behind on a personal level—that is, what we want to bequeath to our loved ones (especially our children)—but also, more symbolically, all the life projects we undertake because we wish to leave something that comes from us after our death (a cause, a work of art, an invention, etc.). It is also about what we will leave behind collectively, as a civilization. Humanity is not a recent phenomenon, and many human beings have managed to leave such lasting traces of their passage that we continue to rediscover them today. The heritage of our civilization is an accumulation, a raw sum of millions of legacies left by millions of people since the dawn of time, whether in the form of art, ideas, scientific knowledge, techniques, values, customs, languages, and many other things that we cannot list exhaustively. This heritage spans thousands and thousands of years and includes all sorts of things—“items”—that have survived to the present day, sometimes by a miracle. All of this is well and good, but we are not the first to address the issues surrounding heritage and its preservation, and it is clearly not the purpose of this manifesto to emphasize yet again the importance of safeguarding our heritage, even if this is not obvious to everyone.

No, the main goal here is to ask ourselves how we can go further: how can we ensure that all knowledge receives the care it needs to endure? How can we ensure that, even in the distant future, all the knowledge humanity has produced remains safe and accessible—not just parts of it? We are more or less capable of preserving all kinds of items in museums, libraries, archives, and other data storage centers, and even on an individual level, we can also build our own small private collections, diaries, and photo albums. But none of this is necessarily designed to remain available to future generations thousands of years from now: this heritage is scattered and does not receive the same level of care everywhere. We are capable of preserving heritage on a local scale, but we are not yet capable of preserving humanity’s global heritage. Above all, current preservation sites remain vulnerable to all kinds of disasters. Or even to deliberate destruction. In this book, we will advocate for what we will call an epistemic memory. At this stage, we can define epistemic memory as a kind of universal and enduring archive—a memory that brings together the entirety (or nearly so) of our knowledge and, indirectly, our intellectual and cultural heritage. An epistemic memory would aim to ensure that all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, can endure for generations and generations, in its entirety. To put it plainly, think of the Library of Alexandria, or the lesser-known Library of Pergamon, which even in antiquity aspired to gather all the knowledge and arts available at the time in the Greek world. Libraries that, alas, have not survived to the present day. A Library of Alexandria does not necessarily aim to centralize everything in a single place, nor even to focus exclusively on the sciences and literature. But the philosophy of wanting to create a lasting space, an ark, dedicated to all knowledge remains at the heart of the concept of epistemic memory. Unlike ancient libraries, behind epistemic memory lies the hope of creating a knowledge bank capable of transcending our own civilization and outliving it.

So let’s explore together the challenges of epistemic memory—that is, why preserving knowledge is fundamental, what threats it faces, and what the goals of epistemic memory are. In short: why on earth do we need to preserve knowledge in its entirety? Next, we will also delve deeper into the constraints behind such a project, as well as the various possible methods or approaches to address them, in terms of comprehensiveness, accessibility, and longevity. In other words: how can we go about preserving knowledge in its entirety for the long term? It is on this occasion that we will introduce the concept of a time capsule, which is closely linked to that of epistemic memory.