Re: How would you save mankind (was Re: What would make you believe?)

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:58:45 +0100, Jens Egon Nyborg
<jens.e.nyborg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Bryan Derksen skrev:
>> Derek Lyons wrote:
>>> Jens Egon Nyborg <jens.e.nyborg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Imagine that you are agent A, hired by someone - anyone - to save
>>>> mankind in a number of paralell timelines. You have access to a time
>>>> machine that will take you back into the past of these timelines.
>>>>
>>>> What do you do?
>>>
>>> Hard to say without knowing exactly what threat we are trying to
>>> defend against or what even we are trying to prevent.
>> 
>Thinking about this, I think it becomes more and more clear that you
>must put a lot of research into this.

Research would be long and difficult. The scenario described a series
of wars and plagues that reduced mankind to a thousand people. That
would, it seems to me, mean a complete discontinuity -- all history
lost during survivalist times.

When you have to start from scratch, building a reasonable knowledge
base would take decades, perhaps centuries. While some people would be
trying to learn the languages, another group might be attempting to
reconstruct the clothing, and others might be contemplating the
esoteric concept of 'money'.

If the people of the future are anything like us, someone, somewhere,
is going to try to do something about the universes about to enter
their final days, and do it long before there's a complete, or even a
reasonable, understanding of the ancient culture they want to save.
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