In my childhood, I was especially interested in science fiction literature describing how people, society or a small group restore the knowledge of humanity. Let's say they are thrown into another galaxy on a small area of the Earth ("Robinsons of Space", Francis Karsak), and they have to rebuild the economy, society to resist the aggressive environment.
Or dead people suddenly wake up on the banks of a long river, young and healthy, but no trace of their old civilization is visible ("The World of the River", Philip José Farmer). In any case - you can recall from the example of "Robinson Crusoe" - it is very interesting to rebuild the world around you.
Not long ago I came across a short interview with the author of Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (you can hardly find a translation) by a representative of Wired magazine.
The author, astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, devoted years of his life not only to work, but also to writing a manual for survival after the end of the world. He compiled the information needed to restart society, from agriculture to how to make radio.
I will gladly share with you the translation of the interview.
How did your project idea come about?
For some time, one question persistently loomed in my mind: "What are the fundamental foundations of our civilization?" We see a lot of things day in and day out, but I don't think many of us really understand how they work, or are created, or repaired, or made of; where our food comes from, our clothing, how the materials are developed, the metals and plastics we use, the chemistry that goes hand in hand with us.
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I just wanted to sit down and answer the question I asked myself: let's say there was an apocalypse, civilization was destroyed, but you survived. What do you need to know? What knowledge do you need to have in order to survive and feed yourself? What do you need to know to restart a civilization from scratch? How to speed up history a second time?
Do you think the most common forms of technology can be used differently a second time?
You know, it turns out that you can start a car that is an internal combustion engine without using fossil fuels. You can start a car on a tree - using a process called gasification.
Wood-fired cars can still be found in North Korea
In this big thought experiment, I think there will be no access to oil, because we have already sucked out almost all the crude oil that can be obtained by an easy route, and the only possible way to get it today is to use the most complicated drilling rigs that can reach the very bottom of the earth.
You cannot do this when you go back to basics with rudimentary tools. But we can make cars work. During World War II, there were about a million wood-powered cars in Europe, as fuel was sorely lacking. The German army possessed an entire division of tanks that rode on a tree rather than on diesel fuel.
Which idea of Knowledge is more important to you than others?
One of the most important things that society should never forget is something like microbial theory. The fact that people are sick with the plague, not because someone from heaven sends it, but because there are tiny things called bacteria that get inside your body and make you sick.
With this knowledge, you can literally jump over centuries of history. In London, at the beginning of the 19th century, tens of thousands of people died of cholera, because people literally pooped in the river, and ten meters later other people were already washing themselves with this water and drinking it. If you teach people the basics of microbial theory, you may miraculously rid them of ulcers and plague.
More generally, in order to reset civilization as quickly as possible, the scientific method must be reset; knowledge generation techniques are used to rediscover facts about the world and fill in gaps.
How much of this reboot of civilization have you tried to do yourself?
I tried to do enough to write about it from my own experience. I even took the photograph at the end of the book from scratch and would like to remain true to this premise. You mix silver to make a primitive photograph, use a rudimentary camera with a single lens, and then process it.
I also made a knife from scratch, with my own hands, working in the style of 1700s blacksmiths. We worked in an iron forge - kept the metal on fire until it turned red and hot, and then beat the soul out of it with a hammer and a hard place.
I printed a page in a book on homemade paper using basic typography. In Knowledge, I explain how to make paper, ink, a printing press from scratch, so the book literally contains genetic instructions for reproducing itself.
"Knowledge" got a second life on the Web, thanks to the open forum on the project website. How did it happen?
“Knowledge” is my idea to collect the most important information for the restoration of civilization, but everyone has their own thoughts, feelings and experience in this area, so I invited people to share their ideas and discuss them with each other. The energetic debate continues.
One thread noted that my idea of restoring a society after the apocalypse is very similar to a science fiction scenario in which you crash-land on an alien, Earth-like planet without any intelligent creatures. Some readers even choose things and evaluate how they will differ on different planets. The thought experiment turned out to be very interesting.
You have included a quote from Richard Feynman who tried to summarize human knowledge in one sentence. Can you do something like this?
“If, as a result of some world catastrophe, all the accumulated scientific knowledge would be destroyed and only one phrase would pass to future generations of living beings, then which statement, composed of the least number of words, would bring the most information? I believe that this is an atomic hypothesis (you can call it not a hypothesis, but a fact, but this does not change anything): all bodies are composed of atoms - small bodies that are in continuous motion, attract at a short distance, but repel if one one of them is tighter to press against the other. In this one phrase, as you will see, contains an incredible amount of information about the world, you just have to put a little imagination and a little consideration to it."
"Feynman Lectures on Physics"
I have quoted Feynman's quote on the atomic hypothesis as an example of what I was trying to do myself. Roughly speaking, I've expanded one of Feynman's sentences to 300 pages and tried to cover all kinds of science and technology that might be useful.
I was a little more forgiving in terms of volume. But instead of focusing on the atomic hypothesis, I would say that the most useful thing to try to preserve and pass on to the survivors of this hypothetical cataclysm would be something like a scientific method.
I would not try to encrypt knowledge itself, as Feynman tried with the atomic hypothesis, but rather a technique, a method by which you make everything work.
Ilya Khel