A scientist working on technologies for future flights to Mars has written an instruction book on how to rebuild civilization after the apocalypse.
Imagine: yesterday the world as you knew it came to an end. By some miracle, you woke up in your bed, in your clothes, but everything else around you has changed. The streets are in ruins, lampposts are on the ground, cars are abandoned and no one is around.
It is impossible to determine what caused the destruction, but it is clear that something catastrophic happened. The main question is: what's next? How to survive and rebuild society?
According to Lewis Dartnell, author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, “if society collapsed and law and order evaporated, one of your first problems would likely be would be other people. " Dartnell's book is conceived as a "quick guide to rebuilding civilization" in the event of the apocalypse.
Unite to survive
If such a scenario develops, in order to recreate a civilization similar to the one we know, the first thing to do is to unite.
According to Dartnell, "leaving the cafe and seeing that society has collapsed, you will find yourself in the company of like-minded people, like in The Walking Dead, who can support each other, and then you will try to cope with the situation on your own."
Promotional video:
Once you have successfully located other survivors - without the help of Google Maps - it will be a major challenge to gather enough remaining people who are physically able to repopulate their areas of residence. The rest of the world will follow.
According to Dartnell, this will require a lot more people than envisaged in the script for "Adam and Eve." Based on genetic research, he explains that “the seed that will be needed to repopulate the entire world” is several thousand people living together, about 70 of whom should be fertile women.
Settlement is just one of the many challenges outlined in Dartnell's book, which looks at our place in the world and how we got there from a scientific and technological perspective. While the book is not a purely practical survival guide, it covers everything from soap making instructions to the chemical basics of photography.
More than survival
To rebuild society, you need to know where we came from and what are the key factors in our progress. For those who survive in extreme conditions, the most important factor is their own safety - trying to survive after the apocalypse.
As a scientist working on technologies for future flights to Mars, Dartnell believes that the apocalypse for which humans need to prepare will not happen. However, he is interested in the long-term consequences that must be considered when rebuilding civilization from scratch.
“If the world ends, what will you do in ten years, when the food runs out? How do you get started on your own? This is the niche I was trying to cover,”explains Dartnell.
In his book, Dartnell goes from a “grace period” that prioritizes survival to demonstrating how people will recreate the resources they need to recover in the long term. Resources include everything from food, clothing and medicine, to energy, transportation, and an efficient communication system.
In his book, Dartnell describes the technologies by which the restoration of civilization can be advanced. For example, to feed a city, you first need to master agriculture.
“Hunter-gatherers can support themselves by foraging in the forest, but cities and civilizations rely on massive crop yields,” writes Dartnell.
According to Dartnell, if civilization collapses, in order to return to what we have now and build a self-sustaining, revived society, we will need knowledge, and not just any knowledge, but "vital human knowledge and technology in a concentrated form."
Rebuilding the future, survivors could rely on history. Speaking about the meaning of his book, Dartnell notes that "it looks at the past - how we got to where we are now, and retells the story, with a description of how we could repeat it, but speed up the process if a reset is needed."
In the end, science brought our civilization to where it is today. Without it, you would not have read this article, would not have taken aspirin, and if with the help of science man had not created a clean and safe supply of water, as well as the rest of the essentials for life, the likelihood that you would be alive would be significantly reduced.
We owe a lot in life to science, but all this can easily be overlooked or taken for granted. Perhaps the apocalypse will remind us of the need to understand the importance of science for our life and civilization.
As Dartnell writes, "Our modern world is built by science, and in order to rebuild it we will need science too."