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From Peter Inkpen

Fred Pearce’s doomsday article introduces us to the human-dominated anthropocene era and details how we as a species are inexorably moving towards the brink of environmental disaster through our own self-serving actions (22 November, p 40). Such a catastrophe could trigger the worldwide demise of civilisation and entry into a new dark age reminiscent of the collapse of other civilisations in recent human history.

However, the main difference between this and past events is that because we have so thoroughly plundered our planet of its natural resources, the new dark age could be extremely protracted, if not permanent, affecting not only our own species but perhaps any emergent intelligent species.

Nearly all of our hard-won knowledge resides in books or, increasingly, on various electronic storage media such as a hard disc or CD-ROM. Books, if looked after, may last a few centuries at most, while electronic storage media would be inaccessible to post-anthropocenes, who would no longer have the advanced technology needed to read information in this format. So not only would post-anthropocenes face a dearth of natural resources, but also a lack of the core knowledge vital to overcome this monumental hurdle.

If palaeontology and more recent history have taught us one thing, it is that no civilisation or species lasts indefinitely. We should, as a matter of urgency, establish around the world several repositories of our accumulated knowledge in a readable format that can be retrieved without any advanced technology. These repositories would need to be resilient to the ravages of time – perhaps located in caverns excavated in geologically stable rock formations. Each repository would need to provide a kind of universal “Rosetta Stone” to cater for the fact that future scholars will almost inevitably speak and write in a totally different language.

Hopefully these repositories will assist post-anthropocenes in their struggle to climb out of the new dark age created by our own inexcusable actions.

Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK