[0xDEAFBEAD]

Someone should start a company selling USB sticks pre-loaded with lots of prepper knowledge of this type. In addition to making money, your USB sticks could make a real difference in the event of a global catastrophe. You could sell the USB stick in a little box which protects it from electromagnetic interference in the event of a solar flare or EMP.

I suppose the most important knowledge to preserve is knowledge about global catastrophic risks, so after the event, humanity can put the pieces back together and stop something similar from happening again. Too bad this book is copyrighted or you could download it to the USB stick: https://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostro... I imagine there might be some webpages to crawl, however: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/existential-risk

[0xDEAFBEAD]

BTW, just for some perspective here. According to Our World in Data, your annual probability of dying in a road accident might be on the order of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

Compare with coronal mass ejection:

"In 2019, researchers used an alternative method (Weibull distribution) and estimated the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class storm in the next decade to be between 0.46% and 1.88%.[45]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Future_r...

If we take that number at face value and annualize it, your annual risk of seeing a serious solar storm (power restoration could take months or years) is on the order of 1 in 1,000. 10-100x more likely than dying in a road accident.

So why is it that you wear a seatbelt, yet we're not prepping for a serious solar storm? Humans are much better at thinking about "ordinary" recurring risks like car accidents, than "extraordinary" civilization-scale risks.

[jvolkman]

https://www.prepperdisk.com/

It's not a USB stick, though. Probably a raspberry pi.

[troupo]

> Someone should start a company selling USB sticks pre-loaded with lots of prepper knowledge of this type.

It amuses me to no end that people think civilization will collapse but they will still have access to robotics and working computers to peruse USB sticks at their leisure.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

It depends on your collapse threat model. In any case, my assumption is that serious preppers already have EMP-shielded laptops and solar panels for a SHTF scenario. And serious preppers are probably doing some datahoard as well. The point is that there are economies of scale in the datahoard. Most of the work of datahoard is identifying data worth hoarding, setting up your scripts, monitoring your webcrawler, etc. Once you've got a drive full of data, replicating that drive is comparatively easy. That's why it could make sense to start a business selling replicated drives.

Maybe there is room for an "all-in-one" product offering with an energy-efficient laptop, solar panel, and TBs of useful data, all protected in an EMP storage case for the event of solar flare.

[Dylan16807]

Nuclear EMP is a big risk to all electronics in a huge area. Solar EMP is millions of times weaker and measured in volts per kilometer. Anything unplugged or even just off-grid won't notice. Even on the grid the biggest risk isn't really the extra voltage on long wires but that some big transformers and other equipment are too noise intolerant and magnify issues.

[WaxProlix]

Many preppers work towards this goal so it's not unreasonable if you've already made the leap to 'something bad happened but I survived with my house/bunker/bug out bag/whatever'. I'm not really a prepper at all and even I've got a little solar capacity, batteries and such.

[nonameiguess]

The US government already does this. Presumably, many governments do, but I've only ever worked for the US, so it's the only one I know of. Every day, the NSA does a dump of Wikipedia, the Stack Exchange network, and God knows what else to import into self-hosted versions of clone sites on classified networks, so US intelligence and military personnel can access this information without needing an Internet connection. The places these get hosted are already inside of military installations, in SCIFs that are behind several-foot thick concrete and radiation shielding that is probably quite a bit more likely than you to survive some kind of event that otherwise collapses civilization. They, of course, also have all of the military field manuals and technical manuals that more or less form a complete guide to how to survive in the wild with no equipment.

That said, I still think I understand why individuals like to do this kind of thing. You're not really concerned about human civilization itself preserving its structures and knowledge. You're concerned about the possibility that you personally will survive some civilization ending event and whatever is left of global militaries and various larger-scale data archiving systems won't care about you or have any way to share the information.

Just be warned, as someone with past experience being in the military and having to actually do these "remote survival with no gear" things, just reading about it is typically not enough to succeed on your first try. You need practice, and it helps quite a bit to have friends, co-workers, some sort of trusted companions who have at least as much and ideally more experience than you. Whoever figures out how to build the first new piece of "technology X" after catastrophe wipes out the last one we had before is far more likely to be someone who built this kind of thing before than someone who spent the pre-apocalypse data hoarding but never actually practicing what they're trying to learn how to do.

[jazzyjackson]

https://shop.sacred-texts.com/product/ista-usb-flash-drive-9...

[rasz]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/11/hands...

https://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia...