Reply #8: Yes, I've been thinking about knowledge retention too.

[GliderGuider]

Having recently re-read "A Canticle for Liebowitz" the importance of this is at the front of my mind. I think there are already some knowledge retention projects going on around the world. What I worry about is whether their repositories will be decentralized enough to be survivable and re-findable (by accident if necessary). It would be a whole lot easier to lose one great big building than to lose 100,000 smaller caches of information. A lot of small stashes would be much better for civilization, even if none of them held a complete copy of all the useful stuff.