In fact, I believe you can help society recover much better by taking a slightly more elegant approach.
The solution can be found in a remark made by physicist Richard Feynman. In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
The more you consider the implications and testable hypotheses emerging from this simple statement, the more it unfurls to release further revelations about the nature of the world. The attraction of particles explains the surface tension of water, and the mutual repulsion of atoms in close proximity explains why I don’t fall straight through the café chair I’m sitting on. The diversity of atoms, and the compounds produced by their combinations, is the key principle of chemistry. This single, carefully crafted sentence encapsulates a huge density of information, which unravels and expands as you investigate it.
But what if your word count wasn’t quite so restricted? If allowed the luxury of being more expansive while retaining the guiding principle of providing key, condensed knowledge to accelerate rediscovery, rather than attempting to write a complete encyclopedia of modern understanding, is it feasible to write a single volume that would constitute a survivor’s quick-start guide to rebooting technological society?
I think that Feynman’s single sentence can be improved upon in a fundamentally important way. Possessing pure knowledge alone with no means to exploit it is impotent. To help a fledgling society pull itself up by its own bootstraps, you’ve also got to suggest how to utilize that knowledge, to show its practical applications. For the survivors of a recent apocalypse, the immediate practical applications are essential. Understanding the basic theory of metallurgy is one thing, but using the principles to scavenge and reprocess metals from the dead cities, for instance, is another. The exploitation of knowledge and scientific principles is the essence of technology, and as we’ll see in this book, the practices of scientific research and technological development are inextricably intertwined.
Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge, rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself. Which fragments, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins?
The value of such a book is potentially enormous. What might have happened in our own history if the classical civilizations had left condensed seeds of their accumulated knowledge? One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars. But what if these treatises on philosophy, geometry, and practical mechanisms had been preserved in a distributed network of time capsules? And similarly, with the right book available, could a post-apocalyptic Dark Ages be averted?*
ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT
During a reboot, there’s no reason to retrace the original route to scientific and technological sophistication. Our path through history has been long and tortuous, stumbling in a largely haphazard manner, chasing red herrings and overlooking crucial developments for long periods. But with 20/20 hindsight, knowing what we know now, could we give directions straight to crucial advances, taking shortcuts like an experienced navigator? How might we chart an optimal route through the vastly interlinked network of scientific principles and enabling technologies to accelerate progress as much as possible?
Key breakthroughs in our history are often serendipitous—they were stumbled upon by chance. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic properties of Penicillium mold in 1928 was a chance occurrence. And indeed, the observation that first hinted at the deep coupling between electricity and magnetism—the twitching of compass needles left next to a wire carrying current—was fortuitous, as was the discovery of X-rays. Many of these key discoveries could just as easily have happened earlier, some of them substantially so. Once new natural phenomena have been discovered, progress is driven by systematic and methodical investigation to understand their workings and quantify their effects, but the initial uncovering can be targeted with a few choice hints to the recovering civilization on where to look and which investigations to prioritize.
Likewise, many inventions seem obvious in retrospect, but sometimes the time of emergence of a key advance or invention doesn’t appear to have followed any particular scientific discovery or enabling technology. For the prospects of a rebooting civilization, these cases are encouraging because they mean the quick-start guide need only briefly describe a few central design features for the survivors to figure out exactly how to re-create some key technologies. The wheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred centuries before it actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may seem like a trivial example, combining the operating principles of the wheel and the lever, but it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear in Europe until millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).
Other innovations have such wide-ranging effects, aiding a great diversity of other developments, that you would want to beeline directly toward them to support many other elements of the post-apocalyptic recovery. The movable-type printing press is one such gateway technology that accelerated development and had incomparable social ramifications in our history. With a little guidance, mass-produced books could reappear early in the rebuilding of a new civilization, as we’ll see later.
And when developing new technologies, some steps in the progression could be skipped altogether. The quick-start guide could aid a recovering society by showing how to leapfrog straight over intermediate stages from our history to more advanced, yet still achievable, systems. There are a number of encouraging cases of this kind of technological leapfrogging in the developing nations in Africa and Asia today. For example, many remote communities unconnected to power grids are receiving solar-power infrastructure, hopping over centuries of the Western progression dependent on fossil fuels. Villagers living in mud huts in many rural parts of Africa are leapfrogging straight to mobile phone communications, bypassing intermediate technologies such as semaphore towers, telegraphs, or land-line telephones.
But perhaps the most impressive feat of leapfrogging in history was achieved by Japan in the nineteenth century. During the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan isolated itself for two centuries from the rest of the world, forbidding its citizens to leave or foreigners to enter, and permitting only minimal trade with a select few nations. Contact was reestablished in the most persuasive manner in 1853 when the US Navy arrived in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo) with powerfully weaponized steam-powered warships, far superior to anything possessed by the technologically stagnant Japanese civilization. The shock of realization of this technological disparity triggered the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s previously isolated, technologically backward feudal society was transformed by a series of political, economic, and legal reforms, and foreign experts in science, engineering, and education instructed the nation how to build telegraph and railroad networks, textile
mills and factories. Japan industrialized in a matter of decades, and by the time of the Second World War was able to take on the might of the US Navy that had forced this process in the first place.
Could a preserved cache of appropriate knowledge allow a post-apocalyptic society to similarly achieve a rapid developmental trajectory?
Unfortunately, there are limits to how far ahead you can push a civilization by skipping intermediate stages. Even if the post-apocalyptic scientists fully understand the basis underlying an application and have produced a design that would work in principle, it may still be impossible to build a working prototype. I call this the Da Vinci effect. The great Renaissance inventor generated endless designs for mechanisms and contraptions, such as his fantastic flying machines, but few of them were ever realized. The problem was largely that Da Vinci was too far ahead of his time. Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the necessary properties and available power sources.
So the trick for a quick-start guide must be to provide appropriate technology for the post-apocalyptic world, in the same way that aid agencies today supply suitable intermediate technologies to communities in the developing world. These are solutions that offer a significant improvement on the status quo—an advance from the existing, rudimentary technology—but which are still able to be repaired and maintained by local workmen with the practical skills, tools, and materials available. Thus the aim for an accelerated reboot of civilization is to jump directly to a level that saves centuries of incremental development, but that can still be achieved with rudimentary materials and techniques—the sweet-spot intermediate technology.
It is these features of our own history—serendipitous discoveries, inventions that were not waiting for any prerequisite knowledge, gateway technologies that stimulated progress in many areas, and opportunities to leapfrog over intermediate stages—that give us optimism that a well-designed quick-start manual for civilization could give directions toward the most fertile investigations and the crucial principles behind key technologies, guiding an optimal route through the web of science and technology, and so greatly accelerate rebuilding. Imagine science when you’re not fumbling around in the dark, but your ancestors have equipped you with a flashlight and a rough map of the landscape.
If a rebooting civilization is not required to follow our own idiosyncratic path of progress, it will experience a completely different sequence of advances. Indeed, rebooting along the same trajectory that our current civilization followed may now be very difficult. The Industrial Revolution was powered largely by fossil energy. Most of these easily accessible fossil energy sources—deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas—have now been mined toward depletion. Without access to such readily available energy, how could a civilization following ours haul itself through a second industrial revolution? The solution, as we’ll see, will lie in an early adoption of renewable energy sources and careful recycling of assets—sustainable development will likely be forced on the next civilization out of sheer necessity: a green reboot.
In the process, unfamiliar combinations of technologies will emerge over time. We will take a look at examples of where a recovering society is likely to take a different trajectory in its development—the path not traveled—as well as utilizing technological solutions that for us have fallen by the wayside. To us, Civilization 2.0 might look like a mishmash of technologies from different eras, not unlike the genre of fiction known as steampunk. Steampunk narratives are set in an alternative history that has followed a different pattern of development and is often characterized by a fusion of Victorian technology with other applications. A post-apocalyptic reboot with very different rates of progress in separate fields of science and technology is likely to lead to such an anachronistic patchwork.
CONTENTS
A reboot manual would work best on two levels. First, you need a certain amount of practical knowledge handed to you on a plate, so as to recover a base level of capability and a comfortable lifestyle as quickly as possible, and to halt further degeneration. But you also need to nurture the recovery of scientific investigation and provide the most worthwhile kernels of knowledge to begin exploring.*
We’ll start with the basics and see how you can provide the fundamental elements of a comfortable life for yourself after the Fall: sufficient food and clean water, clothes and building materials, energy and essential medicines. There will be a number of immediate concerns for the survivors: cultivable crops must be gathered from farmland and seed caches before they die and are lost; diesel can be rendered from biofuel crops to keep engines running until the machinery fails, and parts can be scavenged to reestablish a local power grid. We’ll look at how best to cannibalize components and scavenge materials from the detritus of the dead civilization: the post-apocalyptic world will demand ingenuity in repurposing, tinkering, and jury-rigging.
Once the essentials are in place, I’ll explain how to reinstate agriculture and safely preserve a stockpile of food, and how plant and animal fibers can be turned into clothes. Materials such as paper, ceramic pottery, brick, glass, and wrought iron are today so commonplace that they are considered prosaic and boring—but how could you actually make them if you needed to? Trees yield an enormous amount of remarkably useful stuff: from timber material for construction to charcoal for purifying drinking water, as well as providing a fiercely burning solid fuel. A whole range of crucial compounds can be baked out of wood, and even ashes contain a substance (called potash) needed for making essential items such as soap and glass, as well as producing one of the ingredients of gunpowder. With basic know-how you can extract a great deal of other critically useful substances from your natural surroundings—soda, lime, ammonia, acids, and alcohol—and start a post-apocalyptic chemical industry. And as your capabilities recover, the quick-start guide will help the development of explosives suitable for mining and for demolishing the carcasses of ancient buildings, as well as the production of artificial fertilizer, and of the light-sensitive silver compounds used in photography.
In later chapters we’ll see how to relearn medicine, harness mechanical power, master the generation and storage of electricity, and assemble a simple radio set. And since The Knowledge contains information on how to make paper, ink, and a printing press, the book itself contains the genetic instructions for its own reproduction.
How much can one book invigorate our understanding of the world? I obviously can’t begin to pretend this single volume represents a complete documentation of the sum total of human knowledge of science and technology. But I think it provides enough of a grounding in the fundamentals to help survivors in the early years after a Fall, and broad directions for tracing an optimal route through the web of science and technology for a greatly accelerated recovery. And, following the principle of providing condensed kernels of knowledge that unravel under investigation, a single volume can encapsulate a vast treasure trove of information. By the time you put down this manual, you’ll understand how to rebuild the infrastructure for a civilized lifestyle. You’ll also, I hope, have a firmer grip on some of the beautiful fundamentals of science itself. Science is not a collection of facts and figures: it is the method you need to apply to confidently work out how the world works.
The purpose of a quick-start guide is to ensure that the fire of curiosity, of inquiry and exploration, continues to burn fiercely. The hope is that even in the maw of a cataclysmic shock the thread of civilization is not broken and the surviving community does not regress too far or stagnate; that the core of our society can be preserved; and that these crucial kernels of knowledge, nurtured in the post-apocalyptic world, will flourish once again.
This is the blueprint for a rebooting civilization—but also a primer on the fundamentals of our own.
CHAPTER 1
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
The most glo
rious moment for a work of this sort would be that which might come immediately in the wake of some catastrophe so great as to suspend the progress of science, interrupt the labors of craftsmen, and plunge a portion of our hemisphere into darkness once again.
DENIS DIDEROT, Encyclopédie (1751–1772)
THE SEEMINGLY OBLIGATORY SCENE in any disaster movie is a panning shot across a broad highway gridlocked with tightly packed vehicles attempting to flee the city. Instances of extreme road rage flare as drivers grow increasingly desperate, before abandoning their cars among the others already littering the shoulders and lanes and joining the droves of people pushing onward on foot. Even without an immediate hazard, any event that disrupts distribution networks or the electrical grid will starve the cities’ voracious appetite for a constant influx of resources and force their inhabitants out in a hungry exodus: mass migrations of urbanite refugees swarming into the surrounding countryside to scavenge for food.
TEARING UP THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Page 2