In the 1950s, while helping invent computers, John Von Neumann was puzzling over the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing machine. Kevin Kelly has been asking the same question about civilization: what is the smallest library that could restart it — one whose contents include instructions for making a copy of itself?
He calls the answer a Forever Book. The concept has a four-version roadmap. Version 1 is a laser-printed manual of century-old instructions for paper-making, movable type, and binding. Version 3 is the real target: a fully handmade book on mulberry bark in soot ink, where each chapter is produced by the process it describes — "on handmade paper pages it shows you how to make the very page itself." Version 4 is a hard disk that contains everything needed to construct another hard disk.
In 2014, Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation assembled a 3,000-book "Manual of Civilization" aimed at rebooting society after collapse. Kelly recently gave Claude the task of selecting a 200-book seed list and says it "pulled in obscure tomes that only a real student of do-it-yourself would be familiar with."
Previously:
