Electricity, gas, telephone, running water … we rarely think about how much labor, resources and technology is behind the usual everyday comfort. After the apocalypse, it all collapses overnight.
It is good if you know how to protect yourself, make a fire, build a dwelling and get food - this will help you survive in the new world that was established after a global catastrophe. But what's next? All products, clothing, mechanisms, gasoline and so on, inherited from a developed civilization, will sooner or later run out and become worthless. Are we waiting for a new stone age, degradation and savagery? Or a handful of people who have retained their strength and intelligence after the disaster will still be able to piece by piece, step by step, restore everything acquired by "back-breaking labor." How can we help them to take the shortest path and avoid the familiar mistakes that hindered human progress?
“Encyclopedists. Reading at Diderot's, painting by E. Meyssonnier, 18th century.
Denis Diderot, the author of the voluminous work "Encyclopedia, or Explanatory Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts", published in 1751, said that the main task of this book is to become a backup copy of all human knowledge in order to preserve it for future generations, if any a catastrophe will sweep away human civilization, as was the case with the cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome, which left behind only the ruins of cyclopean structures and scattered scraps of knowledge.
Over the past couple of centuries, mankind has accumulated such a volume of highly specialized information that it has become impossible to fit it under one cover. Kilometer shelves of technical literature, zettabytes of data on the Internet, millions of articles from Wikipedia will do little to help a resurgent humanity - it will take thousands of years to assimilate all this information from scratch.
Richard Feynman.
A radically different approach was proposed by the Nobel laureate, the American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. In his opinion, all human knowledge can be contained in just one short phrase:
This statement contains a huge conglomerate of data that becomes more and more detailed as it is thoughtfully unraveled. However, how long does it take for a post-apocalyptic scientist to smelt his first metal based on Feynman's "grain of knowledge"?
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Obviously, the correct answer to the question "how to help our descendants restore civilization after the apocalypse?" lies somewhere in the middle. A “glass bottle” with a sealed message for future generations should contain not only theoretical knowledge, but also concrete ways to help apply it in practice.
Its result - the book "Civilization from scratch: what you need to know and be able to survive after a global catastrophe."
This is not a survival guide as it might seem at first glance. From it you will not learn how to fend off a crowd of bloodthirsty zombies or how to build a fortified bunker to protect against a nuclear strike. This is also not a collection of instructions for growing potatoes and wheat (although they are also present there), drawings of internal combustion engines and alternators.
This book is an attempt to direct the thought of an inquisitive person in the right direction, to give him reference points for deepening his own knowledge and to help understand how different branches of science and practical work are related.
Lewis Dartnell.
The road of humanity to the current achievements of technical progress has been winding and thorny. Scientists and inventors many times went "in the wrong place", got into dead ends, went to the goal in a roundabout way. A huge part of the most important discoveries, such as the law of gravity or the antibacterial properties of penicillin, were made almost by accident, and many important technologies waited decades before they were applied in practice.
Dartnell's main goal is to help the person of the future post-apocalypse avoid these mistakes and go to the triumph of technical civilization by the shortest path.
"Civilization from scratch" consists of several sections, each of which is devoted to an important branch of human knowledge, practically helping to restore the technical achievements of civilization.
Most of all modern crops are hybrids or multiply modified plants, bred by thousands of years of careful selection. Outside greenhouses and greenhouses, without fertilizers and nutritional supplements, irrigation and artificial pollination, they will not survive in the "wild" for two seasons. As soon as the industrial agriculture system with all its agronomists, combines and factories collapses, we will lose about three-quarters of the cultivated plants.
Even if our lucky ancestors who survived the disaster manage to reach the World Seed Vault on Svalbard, which hides in permafrost the seeds of thousands of crops from wheat and rice to radishes and beets, not many of them will be able to harvest using primitive soil cultivation techniques. In the world of the future post-apocalypse, mankind will have to re-master agriculture and develop new varieties of useful plants. Dartnell gives in his book drawings of a plow, a sickle, a scythe, a primitive thresher and other mechanisms from the past that can be powered by horse or human power. Agricultural science will become the most important of the sciences, and the peasant will be the most respected person among the survivors.
But the most important thing is to pass on agronomic knowledge to descendants, without which all these tools are useless. The Norfolk four-field crop rotation, which came into wide use in England in the 18th century, gave rise to a real agrotechnical revolution, and it is he who will help not to die of hunger in the future. This technology involves the alternation of planting different crops (legumes, wheat, root crops and barley), which allows you not to deplete the land and use the same fields without losing productivity for decades.
Without the introduction of effective agriculture and food preservation methods, there can be no further technical progress. If you have to bend your back in the field from morning till night, then you will hardly find time to fix the miraculous preserved internal combustion engine, or experiment with the properties of silver oxides needed for printing photographs.
The most harmless colds, flu and inflammations of appendicitis will mow down mankind as they did just a couple of centuries ago. On the other hand, the population density will decrease, and this will reduce the spread of infectious diseases and massive epidemics are unlikely to soon overtake the survivors.
In order for the young post-apocalyptic humanity to accumulate knowledge and experience, having time to pass it on to their children and grandchildren, before dying from some accidental scratch, it will need more or less adequate medicine. Humanity will need to know in practice how to get life-saving antibiotics from mold, how to synthesize analgesics that relieve pain, how to deal with cholera and carry out simple surgical operations with anesthesia. Particular attention should be paid to obstetrics and obstetrics, which will have to become a key branch of medicine in order to restore the human population.
The most important knowledge that will help survivors jump through the centuries from Hippocrates to cardiac surgery robots is the concept of hygiene and pathogens. The knowledge about bacteria and microbes that cause various diseases, which began to form after the discoveries of Leeuwenhoek in the 17th century, ultimately radically changed the statistics of mortality, and the habit of washing hands with soap (Civilization will tell you how to cook it) and using clean drinking water helped avoid epidemics of cholera and plague.
By the beginning of the 21st century, greedy mankind had already pumped out all the easily accessible hydrocarbon resources from their planet. Now it is not enough just to stick a pipe into the ground to make oil flow out of it, or to dig a quarry to extract coal. Energy is becoming more expensive and harder to get every year.
Therefore, the post-apocalyptic man will have to return to the "origins" - water mills, windmills and steam engines. Horses and bulls will again remember what a harness and a yoke are, and in order to go to grandmother's on vacation across the English Channel, English children will have to learn how to work with sails.
But the complex technique inherited from the ancestors can still be revived. During the Second World War, in conditions of the most severe gasoline shortage, hundreds of thousands of cars in European countries were converted to fuel from pyrolysis gases obtained from burning wood. Other alternatives are ethyl alcohol, obtained by distilling fermentation products, or rapeseed oil.
When all the cars are rusted, machine tools will have to be rebuilt and new cylinders for internal combustion engines will have to be sharpened, when all the solar panels break down, people will reinvent electric generators and learn to build hydroelectric dams. The path taken from the wheel to the magnetic levitation train will become much straighter if humanity knows which way to move.
Almost all materials of construction: metal, plastic, concrete, and much more are produced using controlled chemical reactions. In the post-apocalyptic world, there will be no huge chemical plants and endless trains with reagents, but the simplest production chains can be mastered from scratch.
The most experienced survivors will have to remember how to get lime and glass necessary for the construction of tall buildings (all skyscrapers of modern cities, if only they survive after a nuclear war, will collapse within the next 100 years after a worldwide catastrophe), how to synthesize organic acids, alkalis and acetone and creosote for protecting wooden structures.
The ability to obtain substances and materials with desired properties is an essential condition for human development. When nature does not have enough "imagination" to make a product with the necessary qualities, a person has to create it artificially. And the more complex technologies become, the more such substances will be needed.
As soon as the monkey got up on two legs and descended from the tree to the savannah, she embarked on the path of technological progress. From a digging stick through stone arrowheads, bronze maces, a wheel, a sail, a printing press, a steam engine to modern computers and flights to the moon, in fact, not so much time has passed - just a few hundred thousand years.
But the desire for scientific knowledge has always argued with irrational ideas about the world around us - folk medicine, religious cults and fears of the unknown prevented humanity from moving forward. Only rational thinking and critical analysis can keep humanity from falling into the abyss of degradation and the darkness of superstition.
To achieve technical progress, the man of the future must elevate the scientific approach to understanding the world into a cult, make a scientific experiment the king of proofs and master the necessary sections of theoretical mathematics, physics and chemistry, preserve (or invent) his system of measures of length, mass, time and temperature, create their standards and the "Chamber of Weights and Measures" and, in the end, master the printing and communication systems such as writing and telegraph in order to accumulate and effectively transmit knowledge to future generations.
But even if you are lucky not to live to see the apocalypse or this valuable book burns in a nuclear flame along with the volumes of Turgenev and the stories of Irwin Welch on your shelf - it will still be useful. In Dartnell's "Civilization" one can find a lot of entertaining facts that open up the familiar world around us and our interconnections with it in a new way.
In addition, “Civilization” is an excellent occasion to once again think about the fragility of our being and the value of small inconspicuous achievements that add up to a powerful body of human progress.
Author: Roman Sorokin