The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch

by Lewis Dartnell

  The bright urban illumination and light pollution of modern industrialized civilization has robbed many of us of our formerly intimate relationship with the facial features of the heavens. But in the aftermath you’ll need to become reacquainted with the configuration of the sky in order to reclaim your connection with the rhythm of the seasons. This isn’t irrelevant, arcane astronomical detail: it will enable you to plan the agricultural cycle to avoid starving to death, and it will prevent you from getting lost in the wilderness.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE GREATEST INVENTION

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets (1943)

  THROUGH THE PAGES of this book we’ve covered many topics that are utterly critical to any civilization, such as sustainable agriculture and construction materials, as well as some advanced technologies that will be required once a recovering post-apocalyptic society has progressed to a more developed stage generations after the Fall. We’ve explored shortcuts through the web of knowledge, what gateway technologies to aim for, and how to leapfrog over intermediate stages to superior, yet still achievable, solutions.

  But despite all the vital knowledge presented in this reboot manual for civilization, there’s no certainty that a post-apocalyptic society will attain an advanced technological state. Many great societies have flourished thoughout history, their wealth of knowledge and technological prowess a glittering gem in the world at the time, but most stall at some point and reach a stasis, an equilibrium state with no further progression, or they collapse altogether. In fact, the sustained progress of our current civilization is something of a historical anomaly. Medieval European society progressed through the Renaissance, the agricultural and scientific revolutions, the Enlightenment, and finally the Industrial Revolution to create the mechanized, electrified, globally interconnected society we live in today. But there is nothing inevitable about a sustained trajectory of scientific development or technological innovation, and even vibrant societies can lose the impetus to advance further.

  China provides a particularly interesting case in point. For many centuries the Chinese civilization was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world. China had invented the modern horse collar, the wheelbarrow, paper, block printing, the navigational compass, and gunpowder—all world-changing inventions that we’ve covered throughout this book. Chinese textile production made yarn using multiple spinning frames with a centralized power source, and operated mechanical cotton gins and sophisticated looms. The Chinese mined coal, discovered how to convert it into coke, utilized large vertical waterwheels and trip-hammers, and beat Europe by one and a half millennia to using blast furnaces to produce cast iron, then refining it into wrought iron. By the end of the fourteenth century, China had achieved a technological capability not seen anywhere in Europe until the 1700s, and seemed poised to initiate an industrial revolution of its own.

  But, astonishingly, as Europe begun to emerge from its long Dark Ages with the Renaissance, Chinese progress faltered and then ground to a halt. China’s economy continued to grow, mostly due to internal trade, and the expanding population enjoyed consistent living standards. But no further significant technological advancement occurred, and, indeed, some innovations were subsequently lost again. Three and a half centuries later, Europe had caught up, and Britain plunged into the Industrial Revolution.

  So what was it about eighteenth-century Britain, and not fourteenth-century China or indeed another nation in Europe at the time, that fostered this transformative process—why there and why then?

  The Industrial Revolution encompassed increases in the efficiency of textiles production—the mechanization of spinning and weaving, transplanting these traditionally small-scale, home-based activities into large, centralized cotton mills—as well as advances in iron making and steam power. And once industrialization got underway, the process fed itself, and the transformation accelerated: coal-fired steam engines pumping out mines allowed more coal to be extracted, which fueled blast furnaces to produce more iron and steel, which in turn were used to build more steam engines and other machinery. But the conditions that made all this possible in the first place were quite specific. While a certain proficiency in engineering and metallurgy was of course required to construct machinery for alleviating the toil of humankind, the key trigger for the Industrial Revolution wasn’t knowledge. It was a particular socioeconomic environment.

  There has to be some benefit to building a complex and therefore expensive piece of machinery or a factory to accomplish what is already being achieved by people using traditional methods. And eighteenth-century Britain presented a peculiar confluence of factors that provided the necessary impetus and opportunity for industrialization. At that time Britain possessed not only abundant energy (coal), but an economy with expensive labor (high wages) coupled with cheap capital (the ability to borrow money to undertake large projects). Such circumstances encouraged the substitution of capital and energy for labor—replacing workers with mechanization such as automated spinners and looms. The economic situation in Britain had the potential to generate enormous profits for the first industrialists, and it was this that provided the incentive to put up large amounts of capital to invest in machinery. On the other hand, China at the end of the fourteenth century, despite coal mining, coke-fired blast furnaces, and mechanized textiles manufacture, did not have conducive economic conditions in place to drive an industrial revolution. Labor was cheap, and would-be industrialists could expect little benefit from innovations that improved efficiency.

  So while scientific knowledge and technological capability are necessary prerequisites for the advance of civilization, they are not always sufficient. If a post-apocalyptic society is knocked back to a rudimentary pastoral existence, there is no guarantee it will eventually undergo an Industrial Revolution 2.0, even with all the crucial knowledge provided in this book. In the end, social and economic factors determine whether scientific investigation flourishes or innovations are adopted. Throughout this book there has been the underlying assumption that the survivors in a post-apocalyptic civilization would want to progress along our developmental trajectory to an industrialized life. While I don’t want to get into a debate over whether technology necessarily makes people happier, it is a robust point, I think, that a community struggling for subsistence, with an uncomfortable and punishingly hard lifestyle and access to only basic healthcare, would certainly appreciate the application of scientific principles to improve their standard of living. But at what point does a technologically progressing civilization reach a peak beyond which further advance brings diminishing returns? Perhaps a recovering civilization will reach equilibrium at a certain technological level, neither advancing further nor regressing, once it has achieved a stable economy, comfortable population size, and the ability to draw sustainably on natural resources.

  THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

  This book is of course not a complete compendium of all the information you would need to rebuild your world from scratch. A great deal of material has necessarily been left out. We’ve mostly focused on inorganic chemistry, useful for making agricultural fertilizers or industrial reagents, rather than the synthesis or transformations of organic molecules. Organic chemistry has become increasingly important over the past century: processing the fractions of crude oil, purifying and modifying natural pharmaceutical compounds into more potent versions, synthesizing pesticides and herbicides for more reliable food production, and creating a whole new domain of materials with properties unlike anything we find in nature: plastics.

  We’ve talked about biology to the extent of how you can nurture certain animal or plant species, or control microorganisms, in order to feed yourself and remain healthy. But we’ve not looked at the details
of how life actually works on a molecular level—why it is, for example, that we need to breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, whereas plants drive the opposite chemical process using the energy of sunlight.

  We’ve skipped a lot of materials science and engineering principles and only brushed over the building blocks of all stuff: the structure of the atom and the four fundamental forces of nature. Not all atoms are stable, and radioactivity offers the possibility of an appallingly destructive weapon, as well as a source of peaceful power, but also allows you to determine the age of our planet, offering a glimpse down the dizzying hole of deep time. In Earth sciences we’ve missed out on the theory of plate tectonics, for example: the mind-blowing concept that the vast continents are scudding across the surface of the planet like leaves on a windy pond, occasionally crunching into one another to crumple up entire mountain ranges. These profound realizations that the world has not always been as it is now, and is bewilderingly old, are required to understand the theory of evolution by small changes from one generation to the next. All of these represent kernels of knowledge that a recovering society would need to reexplore and unpack for themselves by investigation, as well as by filling in the gaps between the other hints provided in this book, before eventually reconstituting the cornucopia of knowledge we collectively hold between all of us alive today.*

  So how do you find things out for yourself? What are the tools you need to relearn the world? Let’s continue with our back-to-basics approach from the previous chapter and look at the most effective strategy for producing new knowledge yourself: science.

  The basis behind all scientific investigation is the appreciation that the universe is essentially mechanical, its components interacting with one another in orderly ways following universal governing laws and not the whims of temperamental gods. These underlying rules can be revealed by reasoned thought based on firsthand experience and observation. First and foremost, science is empirical, and everything must, in principle, be checked and verified independently, rather than basing it on logic alone or merely accepting the proclamations of past or present authorities (or, indeed, this book you’re holding in your hands). So if you want to manipulate the world around you for your own benefit, to create artifacts or pieces of technology that exploit particular effects, you must first develop a sound comprehension of the natural laws that the world abides by. This understanding can come only from observing the world and spotting patterns in its behavior. But just as important, you need to have the capacity to notice discrepancies in the expected pattern: anomalies that betray new natural phenomena—the compass needle twitching next to a wire or the halo around a mold patch cleared of bacteria, for example. This requires the ability to measure things accurately, to be able to place numbers or values on different aspects of nature to compare them and monitor how they change over time.

  The absolute root of science, then, is the careful design and construction of instruments for making measurements, as well as units to count these in. For example, a straight stick marked with regular notches is the simplest kind of instrument: a ruler for measuring length. But in order to communicate to someone the size of an object you’ve measured as 6 notches long, they also need to know the unit you are using—the exact spacing between the notches. Hence the key to recovering science from scratch lies in the creation of a set of measuring units. A post-cataclysmic society will need a system of measures in any case. The basic functions of civilization include the marking of distances for construction or travel, the measuring of fluids in a jug or weighing of solid produce for trade, the administration or taxation of areas of agricultural land, and the timing of different civic activities during the day. We experience these fundamental properties—length, volume, weight, and time—directly with our senses, and they are easily quantified. Other properties, such as heat or the tingle of electric current, we also encounter with our senses, but we need cleverly designed instruments to be able to measure them.

  THE TOOLS OF SCIENCE

  Most societies devise their own system of measures for distance, volume, or weight. These units are usually on a human scale relevant to everyday life: a pound weight represents a handful of meat or grain, and the second is a division of time corresponding roughly to the heartbeat. Indeed, many of these traditional units have been directly based on the dimensions of the body, such as the foot, inch (thumb), cubit (forearm), and mile (one thousand Roman paces). However, the problem with these units is that they vary not only from person to person, but often involve incredibly cumbersome conversion factors: the mile, for example, is equivalent to 1,760 yards, 5,280 feet, or 63,360 inches. What you ideally want is a standardized set of units that are interrelated and incorporate a convenient hierarchy of scale.

  The system used today throughout the global scientific community, and almost universally for national administration and commerce, is the metric system devised in the 1790s amid the reorganizing fervor of the French Revolution.*

  This international system of units (SI is the French acronym) defines just seven fundamental units, including those for length, mass, time, and temperature; every other measurement can be naturally derived from combinations of these units. Smaller or larger multiples of the core unit are restricted to the convenience of base ten, and indicated with an agreed prefix. For example, the meter is the standard unit of length, with smaller objects described in parts of a meter—a centimeter as a hundredth, a millimeter as a thousandth—and larger distances as multiples, such as a kilometer stretching 1,000 meters.

  Alongside the meter, a second base unit is that of time—the second. Building from just these two base properties, using combinations or ratios of them, you can derive a great many other units. Multiplying two distances together (such as the length and width of a rectangular field) yields a measure of area, and consequently area always has units of distance squared. Multiplying three dimensions gives a volume, with units of length cubed. Dividing a quantity by time tells you how quickly it is varying—giving you a rate of change. So dividing a distance by time provides a unit of velocity, such as kilometers per hour, and dividing by time again indicates how rapidly something is speeding up or slowing down: acceleration and deceleration. Units can be combined in ever-deeper degrees of derivation to describe further physical properties. The kilogram is the base unit for mass, and the density of a body—and so whether it will float or sink—is found by dividing its mass by volume. Combinations of mass and velocity yield measurements of the momentum and energy of a moving object.

  So how can you reconstitute this system of measures and units from first principles in the post-apocalyptic world, if no graduated jug, set of scales, working clock, or thermometer can be found?

  Starting with the meter as the primary base unit, you can derive many others from it. Build a cube-shaped container with each interior side exactly 10 centimeters long (one-tenth of your meter). The internal volume of this box is 1,000 cm3, or one liter. Fill the container with ice-cold, distilled water, and the water will have a mass of exactly one kilogram. Use a set of well-constructed balance scales (hang a straight, stiff rod from its midpoint if you need to) and you can use this liter of water to create any fraction or multiple of this unit by moving the mass closer to or farther from the pivot. To bring time into the fold you can utilize the pendulum we encountered in the last chapter. The length of a pendulum that swings each way (i.e., a half-period) in exactly one second is 99.4 cm, and even if you used a meter-long pendulum it would still be accurate to within three milliseconds—a hundred times less than the blink of an eye.* So, building from the meter alone you can reconstruct the metric units for volume (liter), mass (kilogram), and time (second).

  But how do you define the length of the meter for the survivors of the apocalypse, to allow them to unpack everything else from it? Well, the line drawn along the bottom of this page is exactly 10 cm long, and so from this seed the other units can be reconstructed.

  All of
these quantities discussed so far can be measured with very rudimentary implements—a graduated ruler or balance scales—but how would you go about devising from scratch an accurate gauge, meter, or instrument for measuring less physically tangible attributes, such as pressure or temperature? The general principles needed to design novel instruments will be essential for the scientific scrutiny of the inner workings of the world, particularly when you stumble across strange new effects and want to understand them.

  One of the very first scientific instruments you will need to invent is intimately related to the puzzling observation that a suction pump can never raise water from a well more than about 10 meters, as we saw in Chapter 8. Fill a long tube with water, seal it at both ends, and then dangle it down out of a tall tower. Dip the lower end into a basin of water and remove the bottom seal. Water will flow down out of the tube by gravity, but not all of it, and you’ll find that no matter how you set up the experiment, the remaining water column is always about 10.5 meters tall (curiously, this is the same as the maximum height that a suction pump can raise water from a well). At the top of the tube you’ll notice a clear space left behind as the water drained away and where the air has not been able to reenter—a vacuum. The weight of the water column is held up by the force exerted at the bottom by the overbearing ocean of air—the atmosphere. Changes in the surrounding pressure are revealed in the rising or falling height of the column: it is a working pressure gauge. Using a denser liquid makes for a more practical barometer, and atmospheric pressure equates to only 76 cm of mercury (rather than more than 10 meters of water).