What If We Discovered a Knowledge Ark? | Unveiled

What If We Discovered a Knowledge Ark?

When a civilization grows, it acquires a wealth of information… and its continued success is based on how effectively it can use that information to advance. But most civilizations also want to preserve themselves, to lay down markers that say to anyone else in the future that we were here. In this video, we’re looking at one of the most comprehensive future preservation methods around. This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we discovered a knowledge ark? If you could make a record of everything you know, how would you do it? Write it down, perhaps? Or video blog your life story? And what if you needed a record of everything all your friends and family members knew, as well? It’s a difficult task! As seemingly advanced human beings, we all carry a lot of information. So, now imagine what would be required to chart the knowledge of the entire human civilization. Of everyone alive at this moment, with every current human being having been influenced by every past human being that had come before them. It’s a herculean prospect. But that’s what a knowledge ark does. A knowledge ark is a means to collect knowledge and information on a spectacularly large scale. It also goes by the considerably more ominous-sounding name, a doomsday ark, because it’s a concept wrapped up in end-of-the-world prophecies and apocalypse scenarios. The general idea is that a knowledge ark could survive even when the civilization that built it cannot. And then because it survived, it can be discovered by something,anything in the future. If humans started building a knowledge ark today, what form would it take? And what sorts of things would we put into it? It could demand a massive physical space if it contained physical photos, books, and artefacts. But it could also be much smaller if it was digitised onto a database. Most likely, it would be something halfway between the two. A part-physical, part-digital bank of everything. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is one of our most prominent real-world examples of something like this, but even it is limited to only the seeds and crops that it stores. A truly all-encompassing ark would be the seed vault, plus copies of every book ever written, plus complete records of art, languages and technology, plus DNA records for every organism on the planet… it might never be complete, such is the immeasurable amount of information it would need to contain. But, if a future alien species discovered it, they’d certainly know all about us. So, what if the opposite happened? What if we were to discover a knowledge ark, built by another civilization? It would surely go down as one of the most momentous days in our history. There are two main ways this scenario could play out. Either we discover an alien ark on planet Earth, or we discover one somewhere else in the universe. The first causes us to rethink what we thought we knew about our own planet; the second proves to us without question that we are not alone. A knowledge ark on Earth is perhaps the least likely of these two hypothetical scenarios. In the twenty-first century, humans are fairly confident that they understand how their planet works. We have a reasonably robust origin of life story, and we’ve mapped the vast majority of landmasses. We still haven’t explored the majority of our oceans, though. And while we’re reasonably sure of what a cross-section of Earth looks like, we’ve never ventured underground in a big way. In general, it might be said that we as a species prefer to look outwards, rather than inwards. If then, a knowledge ark were to be hiding on Earth, perhaps underground under the sea would be the best place to look for it… but such a discovery would still shatter most of everything we’ve ever believed about our world. An ark somewhere else in space, however, presents a different problem. It would still be a ground-breaking discovery but, as so much of space is unknown to us, it wouldn’t require quite such a dramatic rethink. The ark might be found on an alien planet at a future time when humans have long-distance space travel capabilities. In this case, it would reveal to us that that particular planet was habitable in the past (and could be habitable in the present as well). Naturally, we’d focus all our astronomical attention on the ark world, trying to determine its age, when it hosted life, if it still hosted life, and whether it had any other similarities with Earth. Today, we have only one life-hosting planet sample to study - our own. But now, we’d have another, and it could fundamentally change our outlook. It could change even what it means to be human. Another sci-fi-style possibility is that a knowledge ark could be moving through space, between worlds and galaxies. Here, the ark more closely resembles a ship, carrying the information it contains away from its homeland and to… who knows where! In many ways, proposed generation ships double up as knowledge arks. These are massive, hypothetical vehicles, designed so that their crew lives and dies on board. They travel at speeds far slower than the speed of light, but still hope to bridge huge distances (it just takes them a lot longer!). Regardless, they’re usually seen as the last bastions of their home civilization… and those on board are the last remaining few who can spread their knowledge. They’re the curators of their own history, and the preservers of their own tradition… whether it’s future humans venturing forth or ancient aliens waiting to be found. So, what would the global reaction be if we discovered any of these ark types, with either an alien presence on-board or proof of aliens that once were? If we found one tomorrow, there’d no doubt be disbelief at first. Humankind currently has zero confirmed evidence of anything extraterrestrial, let alone a whole ship’s worth of information… so the ark would immediately dominate news headlines. But it could all prove too much for us to process. As with most sudden, dramatic changes on a worldwide scale, chaos could take hold as millions rush to make sense of proven alien life… and millions more wish that it wasn’t so. The discovery would rock the foundations of science, but also religion, art, philosophy, and literature. It would be so big that humanity, in discovering it, will’ve arrived at a decisive moment in its own story - a point from which we would think of time as being either before the ark, or after it. What do you think you would do? How do you think you would react? The ‘Oumuamua object gave us a small sense of what the human response could be, when it was discovered in 2017. ‘Oumuamua is the first known interstellar object to have been tracked passing through our solar system, and scientists have long debated its bizarre, cigar-like shape. While many suspect that it’s a natural rock or ice formation, some suggest that it could be a form of alien technology. Perhaps a probe tentatively scanning the solar system, or perhaps a ship itself. Could it be a knowledge ark? When ‘Oumuamua was first spotted it was passing relatively close to the sun, but it’s been moving further away ever since. It isn’t caught in solar orbit, and will eventually leave our solar system, to continue through the Oort Cloud and interstellar space. In all likelihood we will never see it again. Unless, of course, it is alien technology… and it decides to return. Either way, as far as we know it isn’t a knowledge ark. It’s just an unusually shaped object that just so happened to be passing through our part of the universe. And yet, it earned headlines around the world, captured the attention of millions of people, and has been a hot topic in science and astronomy circles ever since. Imagine what would’ve happened if it had been a knowledge ark! As humankind grows, and as the Earth changes, we may begin to make more of a collective effort to record all that has happened over the last few hundred thousand years of history. If an alien civilization is out there (or was ever out there!), it might well do the same. And if our two existences ever crossed paths, then we will have reached a higher plain of understanding. We will have opened up another level of the universe. And that’s what would happen if we discovered a knowledge ark.