this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
55 points (93.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35822 readers
1624 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

From what I understand, a lot of knowledge was lost following the collapse of the Roman Empire as manuscripts were no longer being copied at the established frequency and information that had lost relevance (for certain jobs etc.) wasn't being passed down.

If a catastrophic event were to happen nowadays, how much information would we theoretically lose? Is the knowledge of the world, stored digitally or on printed books, safer than it was before?

All the information online for example - does that have a greater chance of surviving millennia than say a preserved manuscript?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

An event today equivalent to the collapse of the Roman Empire could very well trigger a nuclear war.

Nuclear weapons create electromagnet pulses (EMPs) that will wipe every every magnetic storage device, and destroy every semiconductor, that isn't hardened or shielded. Which means the only computers that will survive are those made from specific EMP resistant semiconductors (gallium arsenide usually) used for military applications, or stored in a faraday cage.

Books will fare better than historically, mostly because of the sheer volume of them we have. Unfortunately the least useful books will be the ones with the best chance of surviving, there's millions of copies of 50 shades of grey, so that will almost certainly survive, on the other hand there's probably only a few thousand copies of obscure textbooks on things like building steam engines we will need to rebuild society.

[โ€“] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

EMP really doesn't affect nearly as much as we've been lead to believe.

A direct lightning bolt to a car (millions of volts), doesn't destroy the ECM - a car will start right up afterwards.

An EMP is a magnetic field - an impacted device must attenuate that field (i.e. act like an antenna) to generate an electrical pulse on it's circuits. Plus the energy of any field dissipates as a square of the distance. Trying to get millions of volts into a device via magnetic pulse is a serious challenge.