Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
1) You believe that a truly massive war is brewing.
2) Create a colony/ark to preserve vast amounts of cultural, historical, technological, and scientific, information.
3) Preserve as much of humanity's heritage as possible.
4) Preserve a wide range of human genetic variability.
5) Extra credit, will you disguise the colony or just hide it?
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The solution would be a combination of all of the previous solutions, and then some. Due to the indefinite magnitudes of 1, 3, and 4, you need to take the seed approach, so that many many copies of 3 and 4 can be made and scattered widely in order to survive 1.
Regarding 5, some seeds will need to be hidden indefinitely. Rather than "disguise" the seeds, you want to include a super-dense, deep time-proof storage unit with minifacturing capacity in *eveything* that might possibly hold one with plausible deniability so that even deliberate, targeted destruction of colony seeds would be impossibly resource-intensive, a task comparable to scouring the solar system of all manmade artifacts.
You'd need to provide for some group communication method so that most any subset of seeds can communicate with the least necessary exposure of vulnerable elements and to have sequestered bundles of materials and automation to bootstrap seeds into somewhat defensible habitats.
Cloud-Nines seem like an efficient choice, if you can make a bundle of them something like a dandelion that will approach a body with an atmosphere and bounce a few times before breaking into a zillion aerostatic structures that all show signs of inhabitation so that any remaining aggression has a miniscule chance of damaging a mature reconstruction of antebellum society.
You'll also need a crew of infomorphic engineers to oversee the work needed for a seed to germinate and mature into something meatbags would want to live in but that aren't prejudiced against meatbags and won't retaliate against the meatbags when they inevitably put meat concerns ahead of sapience concerns.
A similar crew of content providers would be useful to keep the enginers from getting bored and perhaps could keep the archives of 3 up-to-date from the time of seedlaunch to the time of total war under 1.