A new book compiles knowledge necessary for society to recover after disaster

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rebooting-civilization-survivorse28099-how-to-guide-for-restoring-technology-after-the-apocalypse-excerpt/

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

280 133 12 years ago

scientificamerican.com

coldcode• 12 years ago

I wonder if it suggests society not recreate lawyers.

zhemao• 12 years ago

Well, Sir Thomas More certainly felt that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)

devindotcom• 12 years ago

He also thought we should all wear identical brown cloth and have no possessions :D

sogen3• 12 years ago

hint at a Lionel Hutz quote?

awhitty• 12 years ago

What I find interesting is that many (if not all) people who buy this book aren't really anticipating having to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead they're more likely interested in learning about the essentials and fundamentals of society in this dire frame. It almost seems like a "500 things you should know" book dressed up with a more serious tone.

kqr2• 12 years ago

A good sci-fi book on this topic is the Earth Abides:

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abides-George-R-Stewart/dp/03454...

From one of the reviews:

One thing that disturbs people about Earth Abides is its incredible humbling realism about the human condition. People who read it come away profoundly unnerved by the idea that civilization is not something guaranteed to come into existence if we lose it and that it requires an enormous convergence of many different kinds of stimulus to create the energies needed within a race of men to bring it into being. Even the most gifted races of people on the Earth can barely hold it together in the best of times, George Stewart shows us how easily it can all fall apart and remain in a primeval condition for untold generations.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3L6EVT6CXOAFM/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...

cpeterso4• 12 years ago

There's a good possibility that, even with all our current knowledge, we could not reboot civilization because we've tapped much of the Earth's easily-accessible oil.

morganf• 12 years ago

Wow, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work! I just re-read Ecclesiastes 5 minutes before reading your post -- and in the opening lines it says (KJV translation), "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." In my previous readings, I had never thought about the phrase "the earth abides" but in this morning's reading I did, and now I just saw it used here in the book title! :)

(PS: yeah, I know this isn't a super on-target tech web 2.0 scalable infrastructure comment like most on HN -- I'm just always in awe of baader-meinhof at work!) :)

nileshtrivedi• 12 years ago

It reminded of this SMBC comic: https://medium.com/the-nib/a2ac3c553d47

batbomb• 12 years ago

I remember browsing through this book once:

http://www.amazon.com/Instrument-Engineers-Handbook-Vol-Meas...

And I was utterly amazed at the instructions it had for building almost so many different things. I also have an old physics book from the 60s that covers a ton of electrical and mechanical engineering concepts in a pretty basic manner.

sogen3• 12 years ago

Wasn't there a t-shirt with a list of how to make something from scratch??

CanSpice• 12 years ago

Are you thinking of the Time Traveler Essentials Shirt? http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=...

sogen3• 12 years ago

Thanks a lot man! upvoted (y)

Zikes• 12 years ago

Reminds me of the "Moties" in The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye#Motie_cul...

kephra• 12 years ago

A better SciFi that fits this book is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

cpeterso4• 12 years ago

Or the Encyclopedia Galactica in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

hyp02• 12 years ago

Niven used a similar idea for the Library on the Pak Protector homeworld (Protector) for persisting knowledge through constant warfare.

And with David Gerrold (who wrote The Trouble with Tribbles Star Trek episode), The Flying Sorcerers, with "pull up" lines: needing to make the things to make the other things. (Niven's Ringworld also has a problem with restarting civilization: no ore beneath the surface - though, why not use rusted cars etc?) Games like Civilization arguably also use this idea, with their tree/graph of technologies. A Fire Upon the Deep (FUP, Vinge) does a little of this, also talks of restoring technology in the Slownness as a hobby of Uni Depts.

It's always reminded me of people in the Renaissance wondering in awe at ancient greek civilization (and even today, we use many of their ideas, particularly civic/municipal/government - arguably, a kind of "technology", a way of organizing people).

FUP also notes there are some very simple mechanisms that aren't discovered until technology has progressed well beyond what was needed (because the principle needed to understand them was very advanced). IIRC the example was a torsional quantum antennae (with I assume is related to a waveguide antennae).

Dragon's Egg (Forward) has the fascinating idea that it's more important to let people know that something is possible, than to explicitly show them how. Because then they understand it fully for themselves.

I think also, it has far superior effect-per-information: as another commenter said, you can't really fit all of modern technology into one book.

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

Your post reminded me of "The Outer Limits" Final Exam episode (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667892

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xinb18_outer-limits-final-e...

There was another movie/short film that I vaguely remember with protagonist arguing same thing (with a woman on train?), that inventions are simply inevitable once we reach appropriate technological level. Radio and telephone were cited as examples with multiple inventors popping at the same time all over the world.

bhz• 12 years ago

Excellent book, and a great read. The moties took civilization regeneration to a whole new level!

mhb• 12 years ago

I have to disagree. The first 150 pages were quite a slog and the payoff wasn't worth it.

demallien• 12 years ago

The most obvious Larry Niven book for this concept would have to be Footfall - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall

Humans beat up on some invading aliens that got their interstellar tech from one such reboot library, and then go and invade Earth. We win because their knowledge is deep but narrow, and we exploit that.

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

And the book will only be available on the cloud. That's the only drawback.

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

Amazon also has the hard cover book edition - I know because I ordered it a few minutes ago.

I laughed myself when the default search result was for a Kindle version :-)

jonah• 12 years ago

Being on paper might not help.

A short film[1] based on Ken MacLeod's short story "The Surface of Last Scattering".[2]

[1] http://scatteredfilm.com/ [2] http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-surface-of-last-s...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

And DRM-locked. Hopefully, after the apocalypse, Calibre still exists.

Yetanfou• 12 years ago

I wonder how many people will add this book to their digital library in preparation for some cataclysmic event which necessitates rebooting society...

njharman• 12 years ago

will add this book to their digital library

Those who have little comprehension of what cataclysmic events do to digital storage.

userbinator• 12 years ago

Modern digital storage, at least. Bits etched into stone tend to be a bit more durable.

Trufa• 12 years ago

The idea on principle is nice, but silly to assume that you can sum up human knowledge in one book.

Think about the amount of literature people have to read to became doctors, programmers, engineers, think about "re-inventing" electricity and computers, the world might be re-built but it would take so many generations and it would most definitely look nothing like our.

jonlucc• 12 years ago

I think it might be more interesting to try to publish a book or collection of books that assumes the knowledge is lost, but will preserve the ability to rebuild. Basically, how to get from raw materials to modern technologies as quickly as possible. We could then study those objects to rebuild the knowledge.

mkempe2• 12 years ago

We need to record proper methods of thought (rhetoric, logic, epistemology, scientific experiment, engineering), not just recipes to build things. If we have the right approach we can do anything from scratch -- we'd just go through a Second Renaissance.

Snail_Commando• 12 years ago

Wow, this book seems cool. I plan on checking it out. However, I couldn't help but think that this book presumes a certain amount of knowledge that I think would likely be absent by the time the book is recovered.

I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."

It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].

As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.

anigbrowl3• 12 years ago

Yeah, this is clearly designed to sit on coffee tables as an oblique expression of the owner's cynicism rather than function as an actual field guide.

Lost_BiomedE4• 12 years ago

It is a thinly disguised way to teach.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

Photography is an interesting knowledge (some basic chemistry might help)

Apart from that: metallurgy.

Very few modern things can be made with one's bare hands and without tools. Tools that help build more tools would be essential for re-bootstrapping.

(Chopping the first trees so that you would have something to make fire so you could melt metal would be very hard)

jarrett2• 12 years ago

I believe historically that was achieved with stone tools. So you make some stone axes, hatchets, adzes, chisels, etc. You use those to bootstrap a basic metallurgy setup, including chopping the trees for charcoal.

I think energy is the bigger challenge. In Britain in the 1600s, for example, the growth rate of trees couldn't keep up with the demand for charcoal. That was one of the factors that led to the widespread mining of coal, which previously had not been a major energy source in Britain.

The easily mineable fossil fuels are pretty much depleted now. We rely on advanced technology to extract the fossil fuels that power us today. A rebooted civilization might be stuck with charcoal. In which case its energy usage would be capped by the growth rate of the forests.

kansface• 12 years ago

A newly primitive society would use at least an order of magnitude less energy. I think coal would be easy enough to come by (if you live in Appalachia), but petrochemicals would be troube.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

Coal - there is lots, and lots of readily available coal.

aethertap2• 12 years ago

One of the things that I think would be essential for an effort like this is a reference that describes the pivotal experiments and resulting insights that led us to our current level of scientific knowledge. To me, those accumulated inductive leaps of genius or luck are the real inheritance of our civilization.

Does anyone know if this book dives into that, or if not is there any other prepackaged "this is how science got here" kind of resource out there?

aperrien• 12 years ago

You might want to check out James Burke's "Connections" series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

zwegner• 12 years ago

Thanks, that looks really awesome, starting to watch now.

Some really cool music in it too, featuring Edgard Varese!

aethertap2• 12 years ago

Thanks for that link, it looks like it'll make for some fascinating watching.

Blahah• 12 years ago

The best I know of in one coherent resource is the History of Science series of lectures by Lawrence Principe at Johns Hopkins, published by The Teaching Company:

http://www.thegreatcourses.co.uk/tgc/Courses/course_detail.a...

mkempe2• 12 years ago

Or one could capture methods of thinking that define and support science, so that one could fuel the Nth Renaissance, like Aristotle's works fueled the (Original) Renaissance.

Lost_BiomedE4• 12 years ago

Connections is good. The book 'The Engines of our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture' is similar.

leorocky• 12 years ago

Without access to cheap fuel, since I imagine they may be close to depletion soon I wonder if there can be any recovery.

nchuhoai2• 12 years ago

Presumably, any apocalypse would result in a significant reduction of human population, so I'd say running out of resources is not the primary problem. More like being able to use them

jcampbell1• 12 years ago

I assume you are talking about easily extractable oil. That is getting harder to find without extreme technology.

You used to be able to find oil in Pennsylvania/Texas/California by waking around with high heels. These days you would want a map of Saudi Arabian oil fields that are known but not tapped. Drilling there will still produce shallow wells that produce gushers.

nchuhoai2• 12 years ago

Slightly OT, but I'd love any suggestions for books/movies that deal with this topic. Most post-apocalypse media deals with coping with stupid stuff like Zombies, but I'd love to read/watch more stuff towards how humans would deal with rebuilding our society. Would we keep Democracy?

moskie• 12 years ago

The Foundation series by Asimov comes to mind.

idbehold• 12 years ago

The "radio drama" is available for free listening here: https://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimov-TheFoundationTrilogy

anigbrowl3• 12 years ago

The Road.

theg2• 12 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/... One Second After (nearly done with it) is focused on a small town in the midst of something described here. Pretty good read on the topic.

mjmahone17• 12 years ago

Very similar concept to S.M. Stirling's "The Change" novels: http://www.amazon.com/Dies-Fire-A-Novel-Change/dp/0451460413

salgernon2• 12 years ago

Terry Nation (BBC, creator of the Daleks) created a series in the 70s, called _survivors_ that dealt with much of this. Perhaps a little more human drama than what you're looking for, but gripping.

John Christopher was an author of adolescent science fiction that frequently dealt with post apocalyptic societies. "Empty World" has been my favorite book forever.

cpeterso4• 12 years ago

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel where, after a nuclear war, a Catholic monastery transcribing technical texts (they do not understand) over many generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

Anathem is a Neal Stephenson novel about (again) monastic communities preserving knowledge over hundreds or thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

Lost_BiomedE4• 12 years ago

Also, check out the foxfire books. It is very different style and different purpose, I guess.

From Amazon:

'"In the late 1960s, Eliot Wigginton and his students created the magazine Foxfire in an effort to record and preserve the traditional folk culture of the Southern Appalachians. This is the original book compilation of Foxfire material which introduces Aunt Arie and her contemporaries and includes log cabin building, hog dressing, snake lore, mountain crafts and food, and "other affairs of plain living."'

I learned quite a bit about living in a different 'time', good learnin'.

marcosscriven2• 12 years ago

This immediately reminded me of a quote from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams (4th in the trilogy of 5):

"The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services."

Swizec• 12 years ago

Didn't he eventually open the most popular sandwich shop in the universe? Or at least on that particular planet ...

evan_• 12 years ago

Yes- the society he found himself in had never thought to put meat on bread, so as Sandwich Maker he took on a kind of master craftsman/minor deity role.

marcosscriven2• 12 years ago

I was purposely trying to avoid the comedy element, as although it was written as such, I recall at the time it was a very enlightening point for me. How little most of humanity could rebuild things from first principles.

hooande• 12 years ago

Wikipedia. Put onto a device with a nonmechanical hard drive using technology that will last for at least 1,000 years. Said device would have to be powered with kinetic energy so that someone could press a pump with their hand or foot to give it power. I would imagine that the hardware could be made less complex and more durable by stripping it down to perform only the purpose of displaying text on a screen. We should develop and perfect this technology and scatter it around the world.

I can't think of anything that's more useful than all of the world's knowledge in a small box. The science, research and technology articles alone could turn men into gods of their time, imparting the knowledge necessary to wage war or enthrall most people. Can you imagine if modern wikipedia were dropped off anywhere in the world 1,000 years ago? The world would be completely different. Plus we'd be able to transmit so much of global culture, in different languages no less. If society was completely reset they would still have a knowledge of breaking bad and mash, plus all of the classics of today. Preserving wikipedia for centuries has to be one of the most beneficial things we can do for future societies, no matter what happens.

Specifically about this book, I heard a radio interview where the author said that the technology he felt was most important is the lathe. It's like the ycombinator of tools, you can use a partially completed lathe to make another lathe. He mentioned a story about a machinist who was able to start with one lathe and raw materials, and end up with an entire shop full of different tools. I almost went out and bought a cheap lathe, just the zombie apocalypse starts anytime soon.

redler• 12 years ago

I think it would be particularly useful to include change history and discussion pages. The struggle of how we arrived at this apparent consensus, and the evidence that it was just a snapshot of a (mysteriously and suddenly stilled?) roiling river of debate, could be nearly as valuable as the facts themselves.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

I doubt it. How important would the heavily debated subjects be to a post-apocalyptic society? I'd imagine they would care much more about husbandry, carpentry, metallurgy, and primitive industrial chemistry than whether or not X person was notable enough to deserve a page or precisely how long Colbert managed to keep the page about the extinct elephant altered.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Wikipedia.

Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies.

The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read?

I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Pre...

hyp02• 12 years ago

The obvious solution here is a reboot civilization wiki. There could even be fun discussions about what to put first, the assumed technological level of the target audience, etc. I think many people would find this extremely engaging... if there was an initial thing in place, with some aspects right, but, more importantly, some aspects wrong, to criticize...

outworlder3• 12 years ago

The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly.

Does not matter much. Civilization is not rebuilt in a day. Even if it took a few generations for them to understand the internal organization, they'd still be ahead.

That said, a "book" with that purpose would be much better, indeed.

emw• 12 years ago

We would carve Wikipedia's most important articles in stone.

Wikipedia has a set of 1000 "vital articles" that would be a major asset in rebuilding civilization.[1] Of course, the internal details of the encyclopedia's organization, its Talk pages, esoteric editorial conflicts, Pokemon pages, etc. are irrelevant and would be omitted for a version of the encyclopedia put onto truly durable, readable storage media.

A few years ago, while talking with a Wikipedian about the Long Now Foundation,[2] he said something that has stuck with me:

"Who says it's not in the Wikimedia Foundation's mandate to commission certain articles to be etched in stone?"

I would love to see that goal advertized in one of the WMF's annual fundraising banners. It would be so much more awesome than investing in improved default typography (not that the exquisite new typography [3] isn't nice).

Naturally, there would need to be several language versions and many copies of the stone-etched Wikipedia articles. A more durable storage medium than stone would also be a good idea. And having the articles assumes people in the post-apocalyptic world could read an existing major language to a reasonable degree. Having a gradated table of contents, such that more fundamental and simple concepts came before sophisticated ones (e.g. 'sanitation' before 'vaccine', 'arithmetic' before 'calculus') would also obviously be helpful.

Most of the vital articles that would help in rebuilding civilization [1] are in bad condition. Maybe this discussion will inspire someone to push one of those articles to a better state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles. The vital articles are divided into 11 categories. Of these, the following 300 or so articles from 6 of those categories would probably be the most helpful in rebuilding civilization:

- Everyday life: clothing, cooking, job, writing, and various major languages.

- Geography: city, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Jakarta, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Rome, Sao Paulo, Singapore, country, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Arctic, Middle East, sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, lake, river, land, desert, forest, glacier, mountain, Alps, Andes, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains

- Health and medicine: common cold, influenza, pneumonia, burn, tuberculosis, ageing, antibiotic, vaccine, sanitation

- Science: scientific method, nature, astronomy, asteroid, comet, orbit, Solar System, Sun, Earth, Moon, Universe, biology, life, death, extinction, anatomy, brain, blood, heart, eye, immune system, liver, lung, muscle, skin, skeleton, reproduction, male, female, pregnancy, sex, botany, cell, ecology, evolution, genetics, heredity, organism and the 21 articles within (e.g. bird, insect, animal, human, dog, horse, plant, seed), virus, chemistry, alloy, bronze, steel, atom, chemical bond, salt, water, chemical element, carbon, iron, oxygen, silicon, chemical reaction, metal, mineral, molecule, periodic table, history of the Earth, geology, earthquake, rock, volcano, climate, cloud, flood, global warming, rain, season, weather, wind, map, soil, physics, electron, proton, photon, classical mechanics, energy, force, gravitation, heat, temperature, light, magnet, mass, matter, measurement, sound, thermodynamics, time, day, year

- Technology: all 109 articles

- Mathematics: arithmetic, addition, multiplication, fraction, logarithm, combinatorics, geometry, angle, trigonometry, area, line, point, circle, triangle, sphere, volume, function, calculus, number, 0, pi, e, integer, probability, statistics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

srl• 12 years ago

Have you ever tried learning math, or physics, from wikipedia? It's nearly impossible. I agree that preserving some sort of encyclopedic form of knowledge is a great idea, and that wikipedia is the best we have at the moment, but in the event of apocalypse, it would be pretty much useless.

Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.

jbinto• 12 years ago

I agree Wikipedia isn't great for approaching new topics.

Have you heard of Simple English Wikipedia? It does describe (e.g.) electricity in a useful way.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity

outworlder3• 12 years ago

Not useless, however.

Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering.

Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them.

Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered.

WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks.

I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there.

There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing.

Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars.

Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.

lcedp• 12 years ago

Of course Wikipedia is not meant as a rebuilding civilization guide, but it's the most useful site I've seen for exploring new things and rehashing the things you know.

I've tried learning both math and physics from the Wikipedia and most of the time I've enjoyed it. If I'm feeling frustrated on an article(I know the feeling you have described) it usually means I should read about more basic stuff first (the stuff which is conveniently linked in the article for me).

What do you think useful information about electricity should look like?

sytelus• 12 years ago

If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equations.

But Wikipedia is extremely shallow.

A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise.

But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages.

I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.

masklinn• 12 years ago

Wikipedia

Is way too big and does not actually contain most of the information which would be useful in such a scenario.

web007• 12 years ago

I had an idea once to make something like this, but on a much more (ridiculously) grand scale. The basic concept was "Society from First Principles", sort of a cross between Boy Scout Handbook, Wikipedia and Robert's Rules of Order.

Just as an example of the scale I'm talking about: I wanted the book itself to be useful / durable, printed on something like Tyvek so it would last through more than the average paperback. The first thing I was thinking of trying to figure out is establishing a measurement system under the assumption that all existing weights & measures disappeared and you would have to recreate them. Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight that could be used a a reference. Really, really first-principles stuff, like with only wilderness / stone-age type tools available.

I know I wanted to have different volumes, from basic (individual) survival through communities to nations. Volume titles were something like "Survive", "Thrive", "Rebuild", "Expand".

Lost_BiomedE4• 12 years ago

Do it. You have second mover advantage :)

Make sure to take some from: The Engines of Our Ingenuity http://www.uh.edu/engines/

An example excerpt: That cottage had stood for five hundred years. Thatch is the thick woven straw that makes the roof. The walls are a mixture of clay and straw called cob, or sometimes tabby. The material varies, as well as the name. Cob, or tabby, is a poor man's masonry. To make it, you mix a structural material -- like straw, corn stubble, or oyster shells -- with clay or earth. It makes a solid building material. In one form, we daub mud onto it. Wattles, by the way, are twigs woven together.

zorpner• 12 years ago

I'd love to read this.

Re measurement, this book is an interesting read -- sort of an analysis and attempted reconstruction of the techniques used for furniture building in the preindustrial era (lots of ratios, transfer of measurements without actually putting them into units, et cetera): http://lostartpress.com/products/by-hand-eye-1

a3n2• 12 years ago

Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight

The US Navy issues the Bluejacket's Manual (BJM) to all new enlisted people. It's a How To Be a Sailor book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluejacket%27s_Manual

When I was in bootcamp (decades ago) we used it for important things like measuring how much of a gap there was supposed to be between the top of your mattress and the top of your top sheet: 1 BJM. Sadly, the rest of physics were not derived from the dimensions of the book.

cpeterso4• 12 years ago

This "Hang this up in your time machine" poster is a similar take:

http://blog.longnow.org/02009/04/14/all-you-need-to-jump-sta...

kaa2102• 12 years ago

This reminds me of a physics & engineering teacher I had in high school. He insisted that we use calculus to derive all of the kinematic equations. I think that rebooting society should function in a similar manner. We should remember the key laws, discoveries and methods and then rebuild society better than it was before.

VikingCoder2• 12 years ago

I was picturing an App, "So The World Has Ended," which you could run on an Android that's powered with solar panels.

I pictured RAF / Special Forces handbooks. Describe clouds, knots, wildlife, foliage, etc.

kirubakaran2• 12 years ago

There is a good chance that EMP will be involved. Your device probably won't work.

VikingCoder2• 12 years ago

How about if I store it in a faraday cage?

a3n2• 12 years ago

We also need a site:

Has the World Ended Yet?

  YES[  ]   NO[ X ]

Edit: Ahem ... http://hastheworldalreadyended.com/

mrbill2• 12 years ago

Bought this book (the kindle version of course, with a silly grin) and it actually addresses (in the first chapter) how having a hard-copy version of Wikipedia is not adequate at all, and it wasn't designed for the task of rebooting society/technology.

ssully• 12 years ago

How are you enjoying it so far? It sounds like an interesting book and am considering giving it a whirl.

mrbill2• 12 years ago

Definitely worth the $12 price.

beambot• 12 years ago

First, coat a sheet of paper with egg whites containing some dissolved salt, and allow it to dry. Now dissolve some silver in nitric acid, which will oxidize the metal to soluble silver nitrate, and spread the solution over your prepared paper.

OK, scavenge a silver spoon. But now how do I get nitric acid? Google: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Nitric-acid-The-Complet... Yeah, that wasn't intuitive at all.

Sodium thiosulfate is the fixing agent still used today and is relatively easy to prepare. Bubble sulfur gas through a solution of soda or caustic soda

Where do I get gaseous sulfer? How do I make caustic soda?

Setting aside the choice of photography as a "critical development" (vs metallurgy and the like)... this guide needs to be a lot more comprehensive if a layperson is expected to use it. I mean... I'm a decently-smart guy (PhD in electronics/robotics). I could build decent electrical circuits (generators, point-contact radios, basic batteries) from scavenged bulk materials, but I'm already lost in this chemistry. :-/

jws• 12 years ago

The photography chapter is from the middle of the book. It reads like the required components were already covered in earlier chapters.

Edit: chapter 5 covers making sulfuric acid and then describes making nitric acid. It doesn't go into detail other than reacting sulfuric acid with saltpeter.

anigbrowl3• 12 years ago

I assumed that stuff was covered elsewhere in the book. I sure hope it came with safety protocols, as well details on how to make yourself some acid-proof gauntlets and why you should work in a ventilated space. But this is really more of a 'yay science' book.

Istof• 12 years ago

maybe they don't want to show you how to make nitric acid because you could use it to make bombs... I don't know about the other chemicals.

Totient• 12 years ago

I really like this idea and it got me thinking about a lesser, but still bad, disaster:

If all computers were to disappear tomorrow (let's say a super-EMP, or something) how could we quickly restart the digital age? As in, what source code/chip designs would we really wish we had on paper somewhere, so a relatively small team could get modern computing going quickly?

From the source code side, I'm thinking the opcodes necessary for a Forth compiler, a compiler for some restricted version of C in Forth (to keep the source code size down), a quality C compiler written in the simple-C and the source code for some vaguely POSIX compliant system (MINIX, maybe?)

I'm curious if it's at all feasible to put that much source code on paper...

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

You mean we have the opportunity to rewrite everything with our accumulated design know-how without having backwards-compatibility as a requirement and knowing exactly where the puck is going at all times?

Gimme the damn EMP, I'll set it off myself. I can't think of a more fun way to spend ten years.

frik• 12 years ago

The computer hardware would be a real problem. Sadly most computer architectures are guarded as a trade secrete. And even early PCs like Apple I and the one that Bill Gates wrote his first BASIC for, were using off-the-shelf CPUs. One of the last wire-based (non ICs) computers with high speed performace (~ 500 MHz) were the Cray super computers. It seems most of the details are lost in history. We should start to reverse engineer the museum pieces and write the knowledge down on paper. Probably it would also help us with current gen CPU design problems.

The software side will be easier. Knowing ASM of the available CPU architecture one could write a C, BASIC or Fortran compiler from scratch and write a operating system either by using source code from books (like Minix), etc.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

By the time Neal Stephenson is done writing you could probably just use his collected novels.

jrockway• 12 years ago

That's fine as long as refrigerators, bags of milk, and Cap'n Crunch still exist.

qal• 12 years ago

My first thought was this[1] website from a while ago, which it seems like compiles much more valuable knowledge for starting out societies than this book, with topics spanning from agriculture to sanitation. It also remember it being much more comprehensive, assuming virtually nothing.

Note: This is an incomplete index (40%), full download link here[2].

[1] http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/cd3wd/index.htm

[2] http://www.cd3wd.com/mdownloads/index.htm

chewxy• 12 years ago

There used to be a subreddit for these things: http://reddit.com/r/ediscover

I would love for that subreddit to be revived

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

We used to play this game in college. There are lots of interesting fundamental chemical processes that are being lost either due to neglect or intent. The library when I was in high school had chemistry texts that explained how to purify potassium nitrate (salt peter), this was really helpful in making black powder. When my kids were being home schooled I looked for it and couldn't find even a rudimentary book on basic chemistry and the things around us. The librarian suggested that "nobody was interested in that stuff any more." but clearly I was. Made me sad.

There were a series of books the survivalists kept called the 'Foxfire' volumes (http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebookseries.aspx) which basically describe a number of ways to live off the land but not necessarily to reboot the world.

It seems that there should be fairly useful to make a list of useful scavenging targets (like the silver spoons in the excerpts)

yourapostasy• 12 years ago

We will need a true "civilization source code" reference for when we settle the stars, not just for apocalyptic scenarios.

Like much source code, the most stable pieces for our own civilization is gradually lost to the mists of time, and we end up with mostly binary executable-only code. Generally where you will find this is in scaling down of processes.

Thought experiment. You start out with the minimum viable population to simply keep current technological civilization [1]. They are tasked with one task, and one task only for the rest of their lives before an asteroid too big to divert hits in 100 years: document what would it take for someone to do what they do today, because we only have space for 10K people on a space habitat that we can build in that time. How do you go about building the reboot manual then?

You will rapidly find that the fractal nature of knowledge exists in the past as well. There is a tendency today to depict our ancestors as simpletons, but this is a fatal conceit. They may not have had the scale that we do today, but they knew a lot of processes and observations that worked for the scale they did possess, and many times we've lost that knowledge as we never have had to revisit that scale for nigh on generations now in some endeavors.

Part of the enormously difficult task of booting/rebooting technological civilization is simply identifying the lower-bound you want to start from, which defines the scale to start at, and re-capturing the internalized knowledge that worked at that scale but is uneconomic to pursue at our much larger industrial scales today.

If you like this area of knowledge archeology, there is actually quite a bit out there, but you have to look off the beaten path, and "back-port" what we know today to what was practiced back then to "patch over" misunderstandings back then. In some areas like organic chemistry and radiological materials, such misunderstandings misapplied would be fatal. Not a big deal when you have a huge population base and plenty of other people who will learn from the mistake and carry on the species' push into the knowledge frontier. But much more significant if you have a narrow population base and only one or two specialists representing what used to be maybe hundreds of people in a specialty field in the distant past.

An example that is fairly-cleaned up in a highly narrow specialty is David Gingery's series on building a rudimentary machine shop from just scrap metal and charcoal [2]. You would have to look elsewhere for information on how to mine metal, smelt it, etc., how to make charcoal, and how to make progressively more accurate and precise machine tools given a starting point of what we consider today would be quite inaccurate and imprecise tools, but it gives you a taste of what's in store for truly rebooting civilization. Even just to get us back to the 1930-40's level era technology would require a minimally viable trained, knowledgeable population base in the tens of millions I would guess.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic...

[2] http://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrapSeries....

1stop• 12 years ago

I suggest it should be written in the form of lego instructions.

No language required.

ValG• 12 years ago

I will do this, but it will start from the beginning, assuming that all knowledge (including language and math) is lost.

It will start with images, since are universal, and will teach the basics of language and mathematics. It will have to be done in such a way that it's self directed, and to assume that there is no "teacher" available.

It will progress into more and more complicated topics and will explain how certain breakthrough discoveries and technologies were discovered. It will provide the framework to recreate scientific knowledge. It will also touch on civic technologies and management techniques. It will be exhaustive.

The main challenge will be how to condense the knowledge in such a way that it is accessible to those with no technologies (1 book will not be enough). Potentially it will be saved in different technologies, each previous technology will allow you to unlock the next volume of information and technology (and thus becoming more efficient at storing the info).

Once I get to that point from a financial perspective, I will fund it and will put a plan in place to freely distribute the information and make sure that there are set locations across the world where the volumes will be accessible in the event of a major worldwide catastrophe.

I don't necessarily think it will ever be used, but like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault [1] it would be a "nice to have"

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

salgernon2• 12 years ago

You might want to take a look at the thoughts in:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

Where they are basically trying to discuss how to send a message to a future that may have lost our technology, to warn them of the dangers of a nuclear waste dump.

outworlder3• 12 years ago

I think the idea is incredible. But I fear such a "book" would be way too big.

Time to build a fourth pyramid in Egypt.

erikpukinskis2• 12 years ago

Apocalypse preparation really grinds my gears. It demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the relationship between politics and ecology. Many people currently live in an apocalyptic environment. Destitute people in the richest cities in the world live without access to basic sanitation, let alone photography or "digital storage". Governments are a form of organized violence which the capital class use to protect their access to ecological and infrastructural resources, thereby denying those resources to the poor.

In the event of some kind of massive ecological disaster, violence and power will not suddenly cease to exist. The capital class will shrink and the remaining rich will double down on their use of violence to control resources. For them (us?) their standard of living will remain high. Electronics factories and power plants will continue to run, they will just be more heavily protected by militaries.

It will get harder for the rich to tune out the plight of the poor. But we already have many tools that shield us from having to see the violent side effects of our lifestyle, and those tools will just have to be used more thoroughly so we can ignore what will be much more widespread poverty and keep running the machine of civilization.

But this is the thing: that world only differs from our current world only in proportions and numbers. Everything that will happen in the "apocalypse" is already happening now, all the time. If you care about what happens in the apocalypse you should also care about what's happening right now.

You can "prep" to try to ensure that you stay in the capital class when the apocalypse goes down, but I just think it would be a better use of your resources to fix what wrong with the system now, and move away from this kind of zero-sum political system so that everyone can be OK both in the current resource crunch and in the theoretical future crunches.

We have an opportunity to solve the resource distribution problems that have plagued civilization from the start. Let's take that opportunity, rather than spend our effort trying to make sure we "win" and someone else "loses" if things get worse.

lucio• 12 years ago

"Hans Rosling TED Talk"

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

"This is an extraordinary presentation. Being informed about the world is the first step towards a better humanity."

edanm3• 12 years ago

"Governments are a form of organized violence which the capital class use to protect their access to ecological and infrastructural resources, thereby denying those resources to the poor."

Why do you think that?

You seem to have a worldview that is not accepted by the majority of, say, economists, who have spent the last 200 years studying these issues.

So I'd love to here what makes you think your view is correct?

zo1• 12 years ago

No, economists have been arguing and studying for over 200 years, probably more. Simply saying they've been "studying it" for 200 years doesn't make your view or your choice of economists correct.

Let's have a look at the parent poster's points that you're curious about:

1. "Governments are a form of organized violence" This is correct in quite a few different interpretations, even according to some politicians like Obama. Not only that, but have you looked at the statistics regarding how many individuals have been killed by government action? Wars? Execution? Atomic Bombs? Some people, including me, will go so far as to define the government/state as an "organization with a monopoly on force/violence within a geographic area".

2. "[..]capital class use to protect their access to ecological and infrastructural resources" Not quite sure about this one, really. But the government/state does indeed limit usage/access to resources in the environment, for one reason or another. But it also chooses to give/deny access to certain infrastructure. Ever heard of a poor person going to a public school in a rich neighborhood? Bet you've heard about the perks/protection that civil servants, politicians and union members get from the government.

3. "[..]thereby denying those resources to the poor." Government does indeed give quite a few things to the poor. It also incentivizes them not to use the resources available to them in the natural environment. Perhaps that's what the parent poster was talking about. It's no longer feasible for a poor guy to strike it rich by going out into the wilderness and discovering oil. Not just because the easy wells have been found already, but because the government won't grant them permits/resource rights.

Also, here is some extra reading. First some logical fallacies you seem to be using. And another link regarding the ethics of anarcho-capitalism. Also, the numbering is not linked to the above list.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

[2]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[3]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Ethics

erikpukinskis2• 12 years ago

Why do you think that?

It seems pretty self-evident to me... maybe there's a more specific question you could ask? If you are a member of the capital class, then you "own" various "resources", like fields and vehicles and water and ideas, and if a poor person tries to access those "resources" the government steps in and uses violence against the poor person until they stop. If you sit down to write any sort of definition of "property" that's more or less what you're going to arrive at.

Maybe you can point me at what part of this picture you're hesitant to acknowledge?

jerryhuang100• 12 years ago

wait, $US 20-28 bucks for a book to rebuild the society? sounds a good steal. but why you still need US dollars after everything is gone after disasters?

sidcool• 12 years ago

I remember reading an article on this. A book similar to this one was compiled in the early 60s during the cold war when a nuclear holocaust was considered an eventuality.

They even had a copy of laws in place during an apocalypse. One of the laws was disbanding of courts and instituting martial law. It was scary.

malandrew• 12 years ago

Every single bittorrenter that is a hoarder of educational resources (ebooks, instructional videos, etc) would handedly be able to provide this service in much greater detail than any book anyone could ever compile.

wiradikusuma• 12 years ago

I can't help but to mention Fallout's GECK http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_Creation_Kit

nerdtalker• 12 years ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet, but the book that would be most practical to actually recover society after disaster from a purely technical standpoint would be the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Chemistry-Physics-94th-Editio...

The sheer amount of information in that huge book is crazy.

Another alternative would be a wikipedia backup stored on an SD card and one of these or similar: http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia/...

spiritplumber2• 12 years ago

Hari Seldon would have (pretended to) approved.

resdirector• 12 years ago

I'd like to see this tested in a lean way. Perhaps finding a traditional tribe still living deep in the Amazon jungle, giving them this book and observing the outcome.

rhythmvs• 12 years ago

A student of mine (Graphic Design major) made his master thesis on this topic. He devised a pictograhic signage system, developed a “disaster kit”, all items consistently “branded”, wrote and designed a survival manual. All well-thought and scrupulously executed. Cum laude.

    - http://cargocollective.com/sjaakboessen/NOODPAKKET
    - http://sjaakboessen.blogspot.be/2013/

A new book compiles knowledge necessary for society to recover after disaster

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