A thought experiment: All of recorded history disappears

[cursuswalker]

Every written, photographed and filmed record is gone. Every museum exhibit has disappeared. Every to-date discovered archaeological site has been replaced by ordinary ground with no remains of any kind.

All news archives, recorded in any form, are gone.

The United Nations sets up an emergency programme to recover as much as possible from living memory. What could you contribute?

The rules: NO web-links (they are GONE). No book references or quotes that you do not know off by heart.

You do not need to detail all you know here, Just outline what you would be able to contribute.

[cursuswalker]

Historical buildings still in use are still here, but all historical inscriptions on them have been erased.

[DJ Droood]

You do not need to detail all you know here, Just outline what you would be able to contribute.

hmmmm...a folk song by Bruce Cockburn..."Going Down the Road"...

[cat]

Sense of Humor, Patience, and Ingenuity.

i could list all the things i can make and do but these three things seem to cover the situation...
oh and some morris dancing

[Frog]

Every written, photographed and filmed record is gone. Every museum exhibit has disappeared. Every to-date discovered archaeological site has been replaced by ordinary ground with no remains of any kind.

All news archives, recorded in any form, are gone.

The United Nations sets up an emergency programme to recover as much as possible from living memory. What could you contribute?

The rules: NO web-links (they are GONE). No book references or quotes that you do not know off by heart.

You do not need to detail all you know here, Just outline what you would be able to contribute.

Assuming that the written word also included any notebooks I might have....

I guess I would have to go to my Scouting/backwoods/pioneering knowledge - effectively we would have to start again

[treegod]

I'd write. Just write what I can off the top of my head, my own life, my own views and opinions, and scraps of knowledge I have about history.

If it did happen though, it could get quite chaotic

[D'Arzhur]

I would walk on the land and start from scratch again using sensing to learn from Nature what we use to know before books and the rest existed...

[whitehorse]

I could tell you about my personal and family history. Have family heirlooms disappeared too?

I think I'd write a founding 'myth' of how we all got here and claim it was divinely inspired....

[cursuswalker]

I could tell you about my personal and family history. Have family heirlooms disappeared too?

I think I'd write a founding 'myth' of how we all got here and claim it was divinely inspired....

Yes, I'm thinking there'd be a lot of that

[Roost]

Random bits from school history lessons e.g. the first Rebecca Riot was in the winter of 1839 in the village of Efailwen as a response to absentee landlords and the tollgates or Hitler was born in 1889 in a pub in the village of Braunau on the Germany-Austria border, his dad was a civil servant, Hitler was turned down by the Acadamy of Art in Vienna and spent time as a tramp painting postcards. Alternatively it'd be odd bits of local history like the pirate Black Bart (aka Barti Ddu) being born in Little Newastle/Casnewydd Bach here in Pembrokeshire, he was a teetotaler and had a flag of a skeleton on a black background (first Jolly Roger?)

Guess I'd just write down all the accumulated crap from my brain

[cursuswalker]

A good start

[Roost]

T'be honest most of the information I know is ecological and natural history based because that's what I've been mainly working on for the past 25 or so years (ever since my first jam jar of ladybirds taken into school resulted in them escaping across the classroom, wasn't me miss ). But, if it helps I could also waffle a lot about bats - mainly UK bats, all 17species (the number varies though depending on recent discoveries, extinctions and how argumentative someone's feeling), and British herpetofauna, where you can find them, when you can find them, why they're limited to their specific areas, the joys of bottle trapping great crested newts. Most British mammals as well, habits of badgers, how you can recognise a foxes den from a badgers set from a collapsed rabbit warren, different species of rodents, grey v. red squirrels, the differences between the descriptions and habits of rabbits and hares (and some history of the introduction of rabbits), identifying otters from mink via their spraints/scats, identifying pellets of barn owls, tawny owls, corvids, gulls, waffle, waffle, burble, splat. Latin names for different UK species, mostly the mustelids, reptiles/amphibians, bats, some insectivores and rodents and some seabirds. History of the red kite in Britain., it's near extinction, expansion and reintroduction.

I need to expand my knowledge base just in case I wake up tomorrow and all recorded knowledge has vanished

[Corwen]

Lots of traditional songs, folklore customs, stories and stuff about religion (my degree topic), and some recollections of the protest and Traveller scene of the 90s that would interest some historians. And a few poems I have off by heart.

[Bracken]

I'd tell my own life story.

Whenever I go to museums, that's the bit I like the best, and the bit I find the most enlightening by far. Stories about real humans. There's a Jewish museum in Manchester. You can listen on telephones to very old Jewish immigrants to Manchester talking about their lives. It's bloody brilliant.

[Nicholaas]

Lots of traditional songs, folklore customs, stories and stuff about religion (my degree topic), and some recollections of the protest and Traveller scene of the 90s that would interest some historians. And a few poems I have off by heart.

Yeah, I'd be wracking my brain to recall all that "useless" jargon I learned while earning a theology degree.

[reilz81]

the knowledge of the process of astral traveling to go to the past i would train several people to go back to the past and bring back all the history we need

[Myrde]

Well... fortunately I'm a bibliophile. Sadly, I could never reproduce the books that I have read endlessly EXACTLY... but.. pretty close. Like, 70%ish in reaccounting in their traditional style. Failing that, my own rewriting of their prose and stories, but enough to keep the tale alive.

The Mabinogion. The Arthurian Myths. Journey to the West. Sherezade's 1001 Arabian Night... maybe about, again, 60%-70% of all the Nights. Shakespeare's plays. I can never remember his poetry. :/

......I would never try to recreate ANY religious texts, like the Torah, Bible, or Torah. Sadly, those books can be considered the most lethal and most destructive weapons mankind has ever created. Beautiful books, yes! Their meanings pure in intent! But "Hell is paved with Good intentions". For me to recreate them...my words would later be twisted to serve ill-purpose.... that would put so much blood on my hands later...

Alot more stuff, but mostly stories and a gneral history of the world as a whole. Like, a moderate knowledge of the history, not detailed.

[Kernos]

Well... fortunately I'm a bibliophile. Sadly, I could never reproduce the books that I have read endlessly EXACTLY... but.. pretty close. Like, 70%ish in reaccounting in their traditional style. Failing that, my own rewriting of their prose and stories, but enough to keep the tale alive.

Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451. We each should be memorizing a book.

[cursuswalker]

Well... fortunately I'm a bibliophile. Sadly, I could never reproduce the books that I have read endlessly EXACTLY... but.. pretty close. Like, 70%ish in reaccounting in their traditional style. Failing that, my own rewriting of their prose and stories, but enough to keep the tale alive.

Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451. We each should be memorizing a book.

Excellent idea!

[envelope]

How to properly solder something to a circuit board. It's trickier than you'd think, I swear. I also recently learned how to crochet a grannie square. I'm certain the UN would be interested in my contributions.