The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch (3 page)

A reboot manual would work best on two levels. First, you need a certain amount of practical knowledge handed to you on a plate, so as to recover a base level of capability and a comfortable lifestyle as quickly as possible, and to halt further degeneration. But you also need to nurture the recovery of scientific investigation and provide the most worthwhile kernels of knowledge to begin exploring.
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We’ll start with the basics and see how you can provide the fundamental elements of a comfortable life for yourself after the Fall: sufficient food and clean water, clothes and building materials, energy and essential medicines. There will be a number of immediate concerns for the survivors: cultivable crops must be gathered from farmland and seed caches before they die and are lost; diesel can be rendered from biofuel crops to keep engines running until the machinery fails, and parts can be scavenged to reestablish a local power grid. We’ll look at how best to cannibalize components and scavenge materials from the detritus of the dead civilization: the post-apocalyptic world will demand ingenuity in
repurposing, tinkering, and jury-rigging.

Once the essentials are in place, I’ll explain how to reinstate agriculture and safely preserve a stockpile of food, and how plant and animal fibers can be turned into clothes. Materials such as paper, ceramic pottery, brick, glass, and wrought iron are today so commonplace that
they are considered prosaic and boring—but how could you actually make them if you needed to? Trees yield an enormous amount of remarkably useful stuff: from timber material for construction to charcoal for purifying drinking water, as well as providing a fiercely burning solid fuel. A whole range of crucial compounds can be baked out of wood, and even ashes contain a substance (called potash) needed for making essential items such as soap and glass, as well as producing one of the ingredients of gunpowder. With basic know-how you can extract a great deal of other critically useful substances from your natural surroundings—soda, lime, ammonia, acids, and alcohol—and start a post-apocalyptic chemical industry. And as your capabilities recover, the quick-start guide will help the development of explosives suitable for mining and for demolishing the carcasses of ancient buildings, as well as the production of artificial fertilizer, and of the light-sensitive silver compounds used in photography.

In later chapters we’ll see how to relearn medicine, harness mechanical power, master the generation and storage of electricity, and assemble a simple radio set. And since
The Knowledge
contains information on how to make paper, ink, and a printing press, the book itself contains the genetic instructions for its own reproduction.

How much can one book invigorate our understanding of the world? I obviously can’t begin to pretend this single volume represents a complete documentation of the sum total of human knowledge of science and technology. But I think it provides enough of a grounding in the fundamentals to help survivors in the early years after a Fall, and broad directions for tracing an optimal route through the web of science and technology for a greatly accelerated recovery. And, following the principle of providing condensed kernels of knowledge that unravel under investigation, a single volume can encapsulate a vast treasure trove of information. By the time you put down this manual, you’ll understand how to rebuild the infrastructure for a civilized lifestyle. You’ll also, I hope, have a firmer grip on some of the beautiful
fundamentals of science itself. Science is not a collection of facts and figures: it is the method you need to apply to confidently work out how the world works.

The purpose of a quick-start guide is to ensure that the fire of curiosity, of inquiry and exploration, continues to burn fiercely. The hope is that even in the maw of a cataclysmic shock the thread of civilization is not broken and the surviving community does not regress too far or stagnate; that the core of our society can be preserved; and that these crucial kernels of knowledge, nurtured in the post-apocalyptic world, will flourish once again.

This is the blueprint for a rebooting civilization—but also a primer on the fundamentals of our own.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

The most glorious moment for a work of this sort would be that which might come immediately in the wake of some catastrophe so great as to suspend the progress of science, interrupt the labors of craftsmen, and plunge a portion of our hemisphere into darkness once again.

D
ENIS
D
IDEROT,
Encyclopédie
(1751–1772)

THE SEEMINGLY OBLIGATORY SCENE
in any disaster movie is a panning shot across a broad highway gridlocked with tightly packed vehicles attempting to flee the city. Instances of extreme road rage flare as drivers grow increasingly desperate, before abandoning their cars among the others already littering the shoulders and lanes and joining the droves of people pushing onward on foot. Even without an immediate hazard, any event that disrupts distribution networks or the electrical grid will starve the cities’ voracious appetite for a constant influx of resources and force their inhabitants out in a hungry exodus: mass migrations of urbanite refugees swarming into the surrounding countryside to scavenge for food.

I don’t want to get stuck in the philosophical quagmire of debating whether mankind is intrinsically evil or not, and whether a controlling authority is a necessary construct to impose a set of laws and maintain order through the threat of punishment. But it is clear that with the evaporation of centralized governance and a civil police force, those with ill intentions will seize the opportunity to subjugate or exploit those more peaceful or vulnerable. And once the situation seems sufficiently dire, even previously law-abiding citizens will resort to whatever action is necessary to provide for and protect their own families. To ensure your own survival you may have to forage and scavenge for what you need: a polite euphemism for looting.

Part of the glue that binds societies together is the expectation that the pursuit of short-term gains through deception or violence is far outweighed by the long-term consequences. You’ll be caught and socially stigmatized as an untrustworthy partner or punished by the state: cheats don’t prosper. This tacit agreement between the individuals in a society to cooperate and behave for the collective good, sacrificing a certain amount of their own personal freedom in exchange for benefits such as the mutual protection offered by the state, is known as the social contract. It is the very foundation of all collective endeavor, production, and economic activity of a civilization, but the structure begins to strain and social cohesion loosens once individuals perceive greater personal gains in cheating, or suspect that others will cheat them.

During a severe crisis the social contract can snap altogether, precipitating a complete disintegration of law and order. We need look no further than the most technologically advanced nation on the planet to see the effects of a localized fracture in the social contract. New Orleans was physically devastated by the rampage of Hurricane Katrina,
but it was the desperate realization by the city’s inhabitants that local governance had evaporated and no help would be arriving anytime soon that precipitated the rapid degeneration of normal social order and the outbreak of anarchy.

So after a cataclysmic event, we might expect organized gangs to emerge to fill the power vacuum left behind after the evaporation of governance and law enforcement, laying claim to their own personal fiefdoms. Those who seize control of the remaining resources (food, fuel, and so on) will administer the only items that have any inherent value in the new world order. Cash and credit cards will be meaningless. Those appropriating the caches of preserved food as their own “property” will become very wealthy and powerful—the new kings—controlling the allocation of food to buy loyalty and services in the same way that ancient Mesopotamian emperors did. In this environment, people with special skills, such as doctors and nurses, might do well to keep this to themselves, as they may be forced to serve the gangs as highly specialized slaves.

Lethal force may be applied swiftly to deter looters and raids from rival gangs, and as resources become depleted the competition will get only fiercer. A common mantra of people who actively prepare for the apocalypse (called Preppers) is: “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.”

One pattern likely to recur over the weeks and months after the Fall is that small communities of people will gather together in a defensible location for mutual support and protection of their own stash of consumables, looking for safety in numbers. These small dominions will need to patrol and protect their own borders in the way that whole nations do today. Ironically, the safest place for a group to barricade themselves in and hunker down during the turbulence would be one of the fortresses dotted across the country, but now turned inside out in its purpose. Prisons are largely self-contained compounds with high walls, sturdy gates, barbed wire, and watchtowers, originally intended
to prevent the inhabitants from escaping, but equally effective as a defensive refuge for keeping others out.

The outbreak of widespread crime and violence is probably an inevitable effect of any catastrophic event. However, this hellish descent into a
Lord of the Flies
world is not something I will discuss any further here. This book is about how to fast-track the recovery of technological civilization once people are able to settle down again.

Before we get to the “best” let’s start with the worst. From the point of view of rebuilding civilization, the worst kind of doomsday event would be all-out nuclear war. Even if you escape vaporization in the targeted cities, much of the material of the modern world will have been obliterated, and the dust-darkened skies and ground poisoned by fallout would hamper the recovery of agriculture. Just as bad, even though it is not directly lethal, would be an enormous coronal mass ejection from the Sun. A particularly violent solar burp would slam into the magnetic field around our planet, set it ringing like a bell, and induce enormous currents in the electricity distribution wires, destroying transformers and knocking out electrical grids across the planet. The global power blackout would disrupt the pumping of water and gas supplies and the refining of fuel, as well as the production of replacement transformers. With such devastation of the core infrastructure of modern civilization without any immediate loss of life, the collapse of social order would soon follow, and the roving crowds would rapidly consume the remnant supplies and so precipitate a subsequent mass depopulation. At the end, survivors would still encounter a world without people, but one that has now also been stripped bare of any resources that would have offered them a grace period for recovery.

While the dramatic scenario favored by many post-apocalyptic
movies and novels may be the collapse of industrial civilization and social order, forcing survivors to engage in an increasingly frantic struggle for dwindling resources, the scenario that I want to focus on is the inverse: a sudden and extreme depopulation that leaves the material infrastructure of our technological civilization untouched. The majority of humanity has been erased, but all of the stuff is still around. This scenario presents the most interesting starting point for the thought experiment on how to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization from scratch. It grants the survivors a grace period to find their feet, preventing a degenerative slide too far, before they need to relearn all the essential functions of a self-supporting society.

In this sense, the “best” way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic. The perfect viral storm is a contagion that combines aggressive virulence, a long incubation period, and near 100 percent mortality. This way, the agent of the apocalypse is extremely infectious between individuals, takes a little while for its sickness to kick in (so that it maximizes the pool of subsequent hosts that are infected), but results in certain death in the end. We have become a truly urban species—since 2008 more than half of the global population lives in cities rather than rural areas—and this crammed density of people, along with fervent intercontinental travel, provides the perfect conditions for the rapid transmission of contagions. If a plague like the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the European population (and probably a similar proportion across Asia) from 1347 to 1351, were to strike today, our technological civilization would be much less resilient.
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WHAT, THEN,
is the minimum number of survivors of a global catastrophe that is sufficient for humanity to have a feasible chance of not just repopulating the world but being able to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization? To put it another way: What is the critical mass to enable a rapid reboot?

There are two extremes on the spectrum of surviving populations, which I will call the “Mad Max” and “
I Am Legend” scenarios. If there is an implosion of the technological life support system of modern society but no immediate depopulation (such as would be triggered by a coronal mass ejection), most of the population survives to rapidly consume any remaining resources in fierce competition. This wastes the grace period, and society promptly descends into
Mad Max
–style barbarism and a subsequent mass depopulation, with little hope of rapidly bouncing back. If, on the other hand, you are the sole survivor in the world, or at least one of a small number of survivors so dispersed that they are unlikely to stumble across one another during their lives, then the notion of rebuilding civilization, or even recovering the human population, is nil. Humanity hangs on by a single thread and is inevitably doomed when this Omega man or woman dies—the situation in Richard Matheson’s novel
I Am Legend
. Two survivors—a male and a female—is the mathematical minimum for continuation of the species, but the genetic diversity and long-term viability of a population growing from just two individuals would be seriously compromised.

So what is
the theoretical minimum needed for repopulation? Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA sequences in the Maori people living in New Zealand today has been used to estimate the number of founding pioneers who first arrived on rafts from Eastern Polynesia. The genetic diversity revealed that the effective size of this ancestral population was no more than about seventy breeding females, and so a total population a little over twice that. A similar genetic analysis
deduced a comparable founding population of the great majority of Native Americans, who are descended from ancestors who crossed the Bering land bridge from Eastern Asia 15,000 years ago when sea levels were lower. Thus a post-apocalyptic group of a few hundred men and women, all in the same place, ought to encapsulate sufficient genetic variability to repopulate the world.

The problem is that even with a growth rate of 2 percent per annum, the fastest the world’s population has ever grown when sustained by industrialized agriculture and modern medicine, it would still take eight centuries for this ancestral group to recover to the population of the time of the Industrial Revolution. (We’ll explore in later chapters the reasons why advanced scientific and technological developments probably require a certain population size and socioeconomic structure.) And such a diminished initial population would probably be far too small to be able to actually maintain reliable cultivation, let alone more advanced production methods, and so would regress all the way back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, preoccupied with the struggle for subsistence. Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been spent in this lifestyle, which cannot support dense populations and represents a trap that is very hard to progress out of again. How do you avoid regressing that far?

The surviving population would need plenty of hands to work the fields to ensure agricultural productivity, yet leave enough individuals available to work on developing other crafts and recovering technologies. For the best possible restart, you’d also want the survivors to number enough that a broad swath of skill sets is represented and sufficient collective knowledge is retained to prevent sliding backward too far. Thus an initial surviving population of around 10,000 in any one area (which for a large state such as Texas represents a survival fraction of only 0.04 percent), who are able to gather into a new community and work peacefully together, represents the ideal starting point for this thought experiment.

So let’s turn our attention to the sort of world that the survivors will find themselves in, and how it will change around them as they rebuild.