The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch (2 page)

The most profound problem facing survivors is that human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. No one individual knows enough to keep the vital processes of society going. Even if a skilled technician from a steel foundry survived, he would only know the details of
his
job, not the subsets of knowledge possessed by other
workers at the foundry that are vital for keeping it running—let alone how to mine iron ore or provide electricity to keep the plant operating. The most visible technology we use daily is just the tip of a vast iceberg—not only in the sense that it’s based on a great manufacturing and organizational network that supports production, but also because it represents the heritage of a long history of advances and developments. The iceberg extends unseen through both space and time.

So where would survivors turn? A great deal of information will certainly remain in the books gathering dust on the shelves of the now-deserted libraries, bookshops, and homes. The problem with this knowledge, however, is that it isn’t presented in a way appropriate for helping a fledgling society—or an individual without specialist training. What do you think you’d understand if you just pulled a medical textbook off the shelf and flipped through the pages of terminology and drug names? University medical textbooks presuppose a huge amount of prior knowledge, and are designed to work alongside teaching and practical demonstrations from established experts. Even if there were doctors among the first generation of survivors, they’d be severely limited in what they could accomplish without test results or the cornucopia of modern drugs they were trained to use—drugs that would be degrading on pharmacy shelves or in defunct hospital storage refrigerators.

Much of this academic literature would itself be lost, perhaps to fires ripping unchecked through empty cities. Even worse, much of the wealth of new knowledge generated each year, including that which I and other scientists produce and consume in our own research, is not recorded on any durable medium at all. The cutting edge of human understanding exists primarily as ephemeral bits of data: as specialist journals’ academic “papers” stored on website servers.

And the books aimed at general readers wouldn’t be much more help. Can you imagine a group of survivors who had access to only the selection of books stocked in an average store? How far would a
civilization get trying to rebuild itself from the wisdom contained in the pages of self-help guides to succeeding in business management, thinking yourself thin, or reading the body language of the opposite sex? The most absurd nightmare would be a post-apocalyptic society discovering a few yellowed and crumbly books and, thinking them the scientific wisdom of the ancients, trying to apply homeopathy to curb a plague or astrology to forecast harvests. Even the books in the science section would offer little help. The latest pop-sci page-turner may be engagingly written, make clever metaphorical use of everyday observations, and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of some new research, but it probably won’t yield much pragmatic knowledge. In short, the vast majority of our collective wisdom would not be accessible—at least in a usable form—to the survivors of a cataclysm. So how best to help the survivors? What key information would a guidebook need to deliver, and how might it be structured?

I’m not the first person to wrestle with this question. James Lovelock is a scientist with a formidable track record for striking at the heart of an issue long before his peers. He is most famous for his Gaia hypothesis, which posits that the entire planet—a complex assemblage of rocky crust and oceans and swirling atmosphere, along with the thin smear of life that has established itself across the surface—can be understood as a single entity that acts to damp down instabilities and self-regulate its environment over billions of years. Lovelock is deeply concerned that one element of this system,
Homo sapiens
, now has the capacity to disrupt these natural checks and balances with devastating effect.

Lovelock draws on a biological analogy to explain how we might safeguard our heritage: “Organisms that face desiccation often encapsulate their genes in spores so that the information for their renewal is carried through the drought.” The human equivalent envisaged by Lovelock is
a book for all seasons, “a primer on science, clearly written and unambiguous in its meaning—a primer for anyone interested in
the state of the Earth and how to survive and live well on it.” What he proposes is a truly massive undertaking: recording the complete assemblage of human knowledge in a huge textbook—a document that you could, at least in principle, read from cover to cover, and then walk away knowing the essentials of everything that is now known.

In fact, the idea of a “total book” has a much longer history. In the past, encyclopedia compilers appreciated far more acutely than we do today the fragility of even great civilizations, and the exquisite value of the scientific knowledge and practical skills held in the minds of the population that evaporate once the society collapses. Denis Diderot explicitly regarded his
Encyclopédie
, published between 1751 and 1772, as a safe repository of human knowledge, preserving it for posterity in case of a cataclysm that snuffs our civilization as the ancient cultures of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans had all been lost, leaving behind only random surviving fragments of their writing. In this way, the encyclopedia becomes a time capsule of accumulated knowledge, all of it arranged logically and cross-referenced, protected against the erosion of time in case of a widespread catastrophe.

Since the Enlightenment our understanding of the world has increased exponentially, and the task of compiling a complete compendium of human knowledge would be orders of magnitude harder today. The creation of such a “total book” would represent a modern-era pyramid-building project, consuming the full-time exertion of tens of thousands of people over many years. The purpose of this toil would be to ensure not the safe passage of a pharaoh to eternal bliss in the afterworld, but the immortality of our civilization itself.

Such an all-consuming undertaking is not inconceivable if the will is there. My parents’ generation worked hard to put the first man on the moon: at its peak the
Apollo program employed 400,000 people and consumed 4 percent of the total American federal budget. Indeed, you might think that the perfect compendium of current human
knowledge has already been created by the phenomenal combined effort of the committed volunteers behind Wikipedia. Clay Shirky, an expert on the sociology and economics of the Internet, has estimated that Wikipedia currently represents around
100 million man-hours of devoted effort in writing and editing. But even if you could print Wikipedia in its entirety, its hyperlinks replaced by cross-referenced page numbers, you’d still be a far cry from a manual enabling a community to rebuild civilization from scratch. It was never intended for anything like this purpose, and lacks practical details and the organization for guiding progression from rudimentary science and technology to more advanced applications. Moreover, a hard copy would be unfeasibly large—and how could you ensure post-apocalyptic survivors would be able to get hold of a copy?

In fact, I believe you can help society recover much better by taking a slightly more elegant approach.

The solution can be found in a remark made by physicist Richard Feynman. In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “
I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the
atomic hypothesis
 . . . that
all things are
made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion,
attracting each other when they are a little distance apart,
but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
”

The more you consider the implications and testable hypotheses emerging from this simple statement, the more it unfurls to release further revelations about the nature of the world. The attraction of particles explains the surface tension of water, and the mutual repulsion of atoms in close proximity explains why I don’t fall straight through the café chair I’m sitting on. The diversity of atoms, and the compounds produced by their combinations, is the key principle of
chemistry. This single, carefully crafted sentence encapsulates a huge density of information, which unravels and expands as you investigate it.

But what if your word count wasn’t quite so restricted? If allowed the luxury of being more expansive while retaining the guiding principle of providing key, condensed knowledge to accelerate rediscovery, rather than attempting to write a complete encyclopedia of modern understanding, is it feasible to write a single volume that would constitute a survivor’s quick-start guide to rebooting technological society?

I think that Feynman’s single sentence can be improved upon in a fundamentally important way. Possessing
pure
knowledge alone with no means to exploit it is impotent. To help a fledgling society pull itself up by its own bootstraps, you’ve also got to suggest how to
utilize
that knowledge, to show its practical applications. For the survivors of a recent apocalypse, the immediate practical applications are essential. Understanding the basic theory of metallurgy is one thing, but using the principles to scavenge and reprocess metals from the dead cities, for instance, is another. The exploitation of knowledge and scientific principles is the essence of technology, and as we’ll see in this book, the practices of scientific research and technological development are inextricably intertwined.

Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge, rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself.
Which fragments, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins?

The value of such a book is potentially enormous. What might
have happened in our own history if the classical civilizations had left condensed seeds of their accumulated knowledge? One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars. But what if these treatises on philosophy, geometry, and practical mechanisms had been preserved in a distributed network of time capsules? And similarly, with the right book available, could a post-apocalyptic Dark Ages be averted?
*

During a reboot, there’s no reason to retrace the original route to scientific and technological sophistication. Our path through history has been long and tortuous, stumbling in a largely haphazard manner, chasing red herrings and overlooking crucial developments for long periods. But with 20/20 hindsight, knowing what we know now, could we give directions straight to crucial advances, taking shortcuts like an experienced navigator? How might we chart an optimal route through the vastly interlinked network of scientific principles and enabling technologies to accelerate progress as much as possible?

Key breakthroughs in our history are often serendipitous—they
were stumbled upon by chance. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic properties of
Penicillium
mold in 1928 was a chance occurrence. And indeed, the observation that first hinted at the deep coupling between electricity and magnetism—the twitching of compass needles left next to a wire carrying current—was fortuitous, as was the discovery of X-rays. Many of these key discoveries could just as easily have happened earlier, some of them substantially so. Once new natural phenomena have been discovered, progress is driven by systematic and methodical investigation to understand their workings and quantify their effects, but the initial uncovering can be targeted with a few choice hints to the recovering civilization on where to look and which investigations to prioritize.

Likewise, many inventions seem obvious in retrospect, but sometimes the time of emergence of a key advance or invention doesn’t appear to have followed any particular scientific discovery or enabling technology. For the prospects of a rebooting civilization, these cases are encouraging because they mean the quick-start guide need only briefly describe a few central design features for the survivors to figure out exactly how to re-create some key technologies. The
wheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred centuries before it actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may seem like a trivial example, combining the operating principles of the wheel and the lever, but it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear in Europe until millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).

Other innovations have such wide-ranging effects, aiding a great diversity of other developments, that you would want to beeline directly toward them to support many other elements of the post-apocalyptic recovery. The movable-type printing press is one such gateway technology that accelerated development and had incomparable social ramifications in our history. With a little guidance, mass-produced books
could reappear early in the rebuilding of a new civilization, as we’ll see later.

And when developing new technologies, some steps in the progression could be skipped altogether. The quick-start guide could aid a recovering society by showing how to leapfrog straight over intermediate stages from our history to more advanced, yet still achievable, systems. There are a number of encouraging cases of this kind of technological
leapfrogging in the developing nations in Africa and Asia today. For example, many remote communities unconnected to power grids are receiving solar-power infrastructure, hopping over centuries of the Western progression dependent on fossil fuels. Villagers living in mud huts in many rural parts of Africa are leapfrogging straight to mobile phone communications, bypassing intermediate technologies such as semaphore towers, telegraphs, or land-line telephones.

But perhaps the most impressive feat of leapfrogging in history was achieved by Japan in the nineteenth century. During the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan isolated itself for two centuries from the rest of the world, forbidding its citizens to leave or foreigners to enter, and permitting only minimal trade with a select few nations. Contact was reestablished in the most persuasive manner in 1853 when the US Navy arrived in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo) with powerfully weaponized steam-powered warships, far superior to anything possessed by the technologically stagnant Japanese civilization. The shock of realization of this technological disparity triggered the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s previously isolated, technologically backward feudal society was transformed by a series of political, economic, and legal reforms, and foreign experts in science, engineering, and education instructed the nation how to build telegraph and railroad networks, textile mills and factories. Japan industrialized in a matter of decades, and by the time of the Second World War was able to take on the might of the US Navy that had forced this process in the first place.

Could a preserved cache of appropriate knowledge allow a post-apocalyptic society to similarly achieve a rapid developmental trajectory?

Unfortunately, there are limits to how far ahead you can push a civilization by skipping intermediate stages. Even if the post-apocalyptic scientists fully understand the basis underlying an application and have produced a design that would work in principle, it may still be impossible to build a working prototype. I call this the Da Vinci effect. The great Renaissance inventor generated endless designs for mechanisms and contraptions, such as his fantastic flying machines, but few of them were ever realized. The problem was largely that Da Vinci was too far ahead of his time. Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the necessary properties and available power sources.

So the trick for a quick-start guide must be to provide appropriate technology for the post-apocalyptic world, in the same way that aid agencies today supply suitable intermediate technologies to communities in the developing world. These are solutions that offer a significant improvement on the status quo—an advance from the existing, rudimentary technology—but which are still able to be repaired and maintained by local workmen with the practical skills, tools, and materials available. Thus the aim for an accelerated reboot of civilization is to jump directly to a level that saves centuries of incremental development, but that can still be achieved with rudimentary materials and techniques—the
sweet-spot
intermediate technology.

It is these features of our own history—serendipitous discoveries, inventions that were not waiting for any prerequisite knowledge, gateway technologies that stimulated progress in many areas, and opportunities to leapfrog over intermediate stages—that give us optimism that a well-designed quick-start manual for civilization could give
directions toward the most fertile investigations and the crucial principles behind key technologies, guiding an optimal route through the web of science and technology, and so greatly accelerate rebuilding. Imagine science when you’re not fumbling around in the dark, but your ancestors have equipped you with a flashlight and a rough map of the landscape.

If a rebooting civilization is not required to follow our own idiosyncratic path of progress, it will experience a completely different sequence of advances. Indeed, rebooting along the same trajectory that our current civilization followed may now be very difficult. The Industrial Revolution was powered largely by fossil energy. Most of these easily accessible fossil energy sources—deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas—have now been mined toward depletion. Without access to such readily available energy, how could a civilization following ours haul itself through a second industrial revolution? The solution, as we’ll see, will lie in an early adoption of renewable energy sources and careful recycling of assets—sustainable development will likely be forced on the next civilization out of sheer necessity: a green reboot.

In the process, unfamiliar combinations of technologies will emerge over time. We will take a look at examples of where a recovering society is likely to take a different trajectory in its development—the path not traveled—as well as utilizing technological solutions that for us have fallen by the wayside. To us, Civilization 2.0 might look like a mishmash of technologies from different eras, not unlike the genre of fiction known as steampunk. Steampunk narratives are set in an alternative history that has followed a different pattern of development and is often characterized by a fusion of Victorian technology with other applications. A post-apocalyptic reboot with very different rates of progress in separate fields of science and technology is likely to lead to such an anachronistic patchwork.