Preparing for Civilization Collapse Before Space Settlement
As of 2026 it appears we most probably do not have enough time to create a self-sufficient settlement in space before a collapse of civilization on Earth due to an advanced technological event, be it pathogen(s) and/or artificial intelligence application(s).
Let's call this an Advanced Freaking Technological Event Resulting in a Collapse of Civilization, by acronym AFTER-CC. There's also the possibility of an Advanced Freaking Technological Event Resulting in Humankind Extinction, by acronym AFTER-HE.
Therefore, we should plan for recovery from such an AFTER-CC, before the collapse of civilization occurs, such as archiving critical information we will need by storing it on local media instead of on the cloud. Remember, the internet will cease to exist in an AFTER-CC. Even if you can find the physical location of information, it might be encrypted and unrecoverable.
Collapse of Civilization -- What Would It Look Like?
Whichever group is prepared for a civilization collapse will have a major advantage over those who were unprepared.
People take many things for granted in today's complex civilization, which simply won't be there after collapse, or will exist in a greatly degraded state. We will be in nearly a stone age environment suddenly.
We are in an extremely interdependent world, with most people very specialized and dependent upon others for countless things beyond their own specialization. Only a small percent of people are specialists in things like electrical power production, a massive supply chain for fuels, transport of crops to cities, and so on. If there was suddenly a technologically created pathogen which killed or disabled a large percentage of people, or key people, then transport of fuels, supply of food to cities, electricity transmission, and many other things could fail. You can try to imagine what would happen next, with the worst chaos in cities ...
Electric power and new shipments of fossil fuels will no longer be available for a huge part of the world's population. Food shipments will cease. Supply chains will disappear. Cities will quickly descend into battlegrounds for remaining stocks, which will be consumed quickly. Areas surrounding cities will soon be overrun, too.
The groups best prepared for recovery will be those with:
- Storage of technological knowledge for establishing space settlements, onto local media, and media which is robust over time
- Discussions on today's internet regarding how to establish of a worldwide organization with rules on how to try to prevent or delay another AFTER-CC
It is also worth mentioning that any country or large group with higher quantities of the following will have major advantages:
- Solar photovoltaic power already installed, both centralized utility and decentralized farm based
- Electric vehicles
- Weaponry and ammunition against invasions
- Storage and production of liquid fuels suitable for military equipment
- Storage of computer equipment for future usage
For example, China is well positioned for this, especially as regards solar power, electric vehicles, and of course manufacturing and supply chain infrastructure. China's experience in mass surveillance and acceptance of restrictions on behaviors may assist it in leading the way towards humankind survival in the next stage, despite all the philosophical issues and the risks of descending into a centralized, extremely corrupt, and stagnant society in the immediate future. In the longer term, things will be different ...
(China had almost half of the world's solar power output of operational megawatts of a/c power for the grid, approximately 35% of planned growth, and more than 80% of the production of solar panels materials and components, according to a report in 2025. VC-1 China had more than 5 times the installed megawatts of the second place USA, and China's annual growth rate of solar power in 2024 was 45.6% vs. 27.5% in the USA. VC-2
If no group is sufficiently prepared, then the main source of survivors may be rural people living among crops, the most fortunate in tropical areas, and those equipped with solar power (rooftop and other applications such as electrical irrigation pumps). For "preppers", a good shortwave radio should be on your checklist of good supplies to have, to monitoring for any transmissions internationally.
The world will still be full of humans who are crazy, irrational, rationalizing, selfish, greedy, status conscious, and aggressive.
We might need a good natured artificial intelligence to help monitor and control humans (which might take over).
Due to dual use of technologies for both good and bad, sharing of archives of information with any particular political entity may be contingent upon FULL compliance and cooperation in the drastic policies and intrusive measures of a worldwide monitoring organization. Hopefully, if there is an AFTER-CC then the paradigm shift in peoples' outlooks will be great enough for them to commit. However, knowing human nature and many evil and deranged people, there will still be major risks. At least we will know that we should focus more on space settlement as a priority.
I doubt any such discussions will have a significant impact on how businesses and humans currently conduct their affairs. Many will just deny it, rationalize, imagine otherwise, and brush us off, all out of their own selfish self-interest. Many people will learn only the hard way, from actual experience.
We must proceed based not on majority acceptance, but on better understanding the problems and issues than the masses do.
In view of human nature, after an AFTER-CC, it will still be a race against time again to create space settlements before another, subsequent AFTER-CC. In other words, after a first AFTER-CC, and an eventual recovery of civilization, we are back in a race against time versus a second AFTER-CC.
Recovery of Civilization -- Rules and Rulers
There are many possibilities here, especially considering the likely fragmented and decentralized survivors, but the highest priorities would be trying to prevent or delay for as long as feasible another AFTER-CC (an essentially "carbon copy" of the first or other previous AFTER-CC), and trying to create a self-sufficient space settlement before another AFTER-CC. Or, as technology advances even further, of course, humans might become extinct ... but we have no choice but to plan otherwise.
The first tasks would be to create institutions with worldwide powers to monitor extremely closely potentially dangerous research and development, including of pathogens and artificial intelligence. Data centers could be limited in their size and kinds of applications. No more competitive race by greedy self-interested businesses out of control.
Any future research into things potentially dangerous to Earth's biosphere should be moved outside of the biosphere to pods in outer space, which can in turn be destroyed (such as by a small nuclear bomb) if they produce something very dangerous. Considering the benefits of developing various technological capabilities, humans are sure to want to pursue them, so it would be a matter of how to safely do so. We should not consider more work within Earth's biosphere of potentially catastrophic research and development. We should not consider theoretical laboratory safeguards within the biosphere. Of course, imagining completely successful implementation by humans just isn't realistic, so it must be moved to space pods.
Data centers can also be moved to space where they can be solar powered. This is better for Earth's environment. It can also make regulation and monitoring more feasible by a new set of rules. Since artificial general intelligence requires large data centers, we can look out for any which are not well monitored with realistic guardrails.
The development of artificial general intelligence can become not-for-profit, more centralized, and open source to those who are cleared to work on it. The ability to copy and distribute code could be disabled. The only exception would be backups which are encrypted and secured.
The only way that humankind will survive is by being realistic about human nature, and cooperation to put the Greater Good above selfish and selfcentered desires and interests. We must balance individual rights and freedoms with limitations on what people and companies can do with some kinds of advanced technologies which could be used to cause a collapse of civilization or extinction.
We will need a Global Constitution document. Now is a good time to start working on that. We can start with the best parts of the constitutions of various countries. That establishes the law. In addition, there should be a new document which is not a legal document but a general suggestive guideline for behaviors, similar to various religious texts today but modernized, based on scientific understanding of human nature, promoting the Greater Good over selfish and selfcentered obsessions, and highlighting the lessons learned about the damaging extremists and obvious failure of the past. If you want to help work on these two documents, then please let me know.
Storage of Technical Knowledge for Establishing Space Settlements
It is extremely important that current knowledge is not lost to "bit rot", and is made available. The group which best does this will be well positioned to dominate the recovery world.
In short, and simply stated, electronic data storage and hard disc magnetic storage fade over time, as do other storage media. Data centers keep data accessible by copying data from old media to new media from time to time. Here is the approximate life of various storage media, though some can last a little longer or shorter, depending on usage and environment:
| Storage media |
Approx. storage life | Type | Comments |
| Hard drives, mechanical magnetic spinning | 5 to 10 years | magnetic | |
| Hard drives, solid state device (SSD), thumb drives, MicroSD, etc. | 5 years | electronic | |
| Tape, magnetic | 10 to 30 years | magnetic | |
| optical discs, DVD or BluRay, ordinary | 5 to 25 years | chemical | |
| BluRay "millennium" optical discs, M-Disc | 100 to 1,000 years | chemical | Manufacturer claims ... believe it or not ... plastic discs |
| Punched cards, perforated tape | 1,000s of years? | solids | Paper or preferably other material |
| Documents printed into books | 1,000s of years? | solids | Paper or other substrate, ink |
| Laser etched onto glass or metal | Billions of years | solid | Sophisticated |
| Mechanically etched onto metal | Billions of years | solid | Can be more basic |
Therefore, since it may take many years, or decades, or longer for civilization to recover enough to attempt space settlement again, it looks like optical data storage and solid media would be best to have.
The most long term stable storage is so-called Write Once Read Many [times] (WORM) storage media on exceptionally robust physical materials.
There has been some experimental work, by Hitachi and Microsoft, to laser etch data onto quartz glass discs for archival data. Organizing that for production of long time storage media for the kinds of information we want to archive would be quite a project today. On separate and simpler storage, we could record the design of a device needed to be created to read this archival data in the future.
Storage in a phonetic language such as English would make sense. However, if no civilization reads this material for millennia or longer, then there should be some kind of preface to introduce them to the English language, including pictograms. Thus, this project should involve theoretical linguists who scientifically study the fundamental nature of human symbolic languages and the cognitive processes involved, and prepare introductory material to help the finders know what they have found and how to read it. For example, it can make clear that what they've found is the design of rockets, previous knowledge obtained of the lunar poles, and so on.
As regards an AFTER-HE, archived information could be used by any subsequent intelligent species which may arise on Earth millions of years into the future, and/or aliens. For those purposes, at least for any aliens, we could include DNA storage of many humans, and possibly storage of DNA of many other species on Earth at this time which humans have not already driven to extinction.
However, it would be extremely sinful to resign ourselves to a speculative future of leaving life from Earth to the possibility of a later species taking responsibility which is not for sure and which themselves might self-destruct like us, and not trying our best to save humankind now and prepare for an AFTER-CC recovery.
[End of brief summary. Details to be elaborated upon. If you want to help out, please contact me.]
Footnotes:
If you want to prepare for a possible collapse of civilization, then you must start preparations well in advance, as that is not something you can quickly do on your own, so don't put it off until it's too late. I have experience with DIY home solar photovoltaic power including detailed electronics setup (not just as an armchair manager but as hands on work myself from scratch in designing and building complete systems), rainwater harvesting, septic tanks, and various other things. I can also suggest places to live on the planet, and checklists for prepping.
What would be reasons for archiving information in case of an AFTER-HE? The main thing which comes to mind would be an attempt to warn the next sufficiently intelligent species possibly millions of years into the future that they'd better prioritize space settlement, and noting our historical record for them for their history books. Aliens may also come across our planet. Aliens may have received Earth radio wave broadcasts in distant space, but be missing a lot of information which could be provided otherwise for their history archives and for helping others learn from our experience. Also, if we preserve samples of our DNA in a way which would last millions of years or longer, then that may be useful, such as recreating humanity and seeing what we create and become in many more instances, instead of having a dead end. Storage of DNA to be viable for millions of years or longer would also be a good thing to add to our to-do list, combined with labelling the container in some linguistic method designed for aliens to read and comprehend before opening.
Regarding comparisons of media for longevity in storing digital data, this is sometimes called "digital permanence", but it's hard to find discussion on the internet in the above context of a potential collapse of civilization and archiving for the human survivors (nor for a subsequent species, nor for aliens). For example, current corporate work on digital permanence focuses on applications such as storing data which doesn't change, by putting it onto more durable media for long term storage, so that companies don't need to repeatedly migrate data from older to newer storage media. However, in decisions, a lot of weight is put onto relative cost efficiency.
If civilization collapsed and current storage media were not accessed for a long enough period, then the vast majority of the data of our current civilization would simply be lost in a relatively short time. What keeps most data alive over time is migration of data from an aging medium to a new medium from time to time.
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As President John F. Kennedy ended his inaugural speech in 1961, I'll end this the same way:
"Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on Earth God's work must truly be our own." [End of speech. Bold and italicized emphasis added.]
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