Reposted from 2016. All the disaster in WNC made me think of it, though that isn't quite the same situation.
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I forgot to mention how much I liked Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch. It's an instruction manual of how to leap over centuries of dark ages in the event of some apocalyptic collapse of civilization. It bypasses the usual survivalist and sci-fi dystopias of riots in the street and starvation in the first few months, picking up in some more stable period of small societies of less than 10,000 trying to get on with building a civilisation.
For example, simply knowing germ theory, how to make a good anesthetic from nitrous oxide and ether, and allowing dissection of corpses for training, you can get up to the equivalent of 1900 in medicine very quickly. Dartnell adds in how to quickly get to x-rays and weak antibiotics and voila! We're pretty much at 1950 already.
Other things will be harder. Stored petroleum has a shelf life, and we've already accessed the easy oil out of the ground. We'll be able to scavenge metals from abandoned cities, but mining the easy stuff has already been done. We'll have to go to charcoal or ethanol-based fuels, so Dartnell gives directions how that works. There are chapters on how to make glass, four-field rotation farming (that helps us skip centuries of trial-and-error), paper and ink, wind and water energy, clothing, and chemistry. Lots of fun, though toward the end I skipped the second halves of some chapters, as the details weren't so interesting as the overall concepts. The details would be plenty interesting to people who actually needed them, I imagine.
It's pure sport for someone like me. I'm not likely to survive any apocalypse long, so it's all just the intriguing imagination game. Still, I'd like my descendants and younger friends to be among those who survive and prosper if worst comes to worst, so I'm showing it around and started circulating a copy in the family.
6 comments:
I so have to buy this book immediately, and probably buy another copy for my apocalypse-preoccupied neighbors.
Loved my kindle version...uh, maybe I missed the point.
Ha. I seriously considered the Kindle option for a moment, but couldn't bring myself to do it. I ordered a somewhat similar book for this same couple last year, meaning to keep it for their going-away present, because they've put their house on the market and plan to move to rural Oklahoma. It was something I'd proofed on Project Gutenburg; it was full of recipes for all kinds of useful substances and processes using the most basic ingredients that were on the market 100 years ago. The whole thing is available for free on the net now, but obviously that didn't seem like the right format for my somewhat-prepper friends, so I found a cheap hardback version of the old book for sale on Amazon. But we gave it to them for Christmas, since they haven't sold their house yet, and now I need another going-away present on hand in case they do get a buyer and really move. This should be perfect. And naturally I have to read it myself.
Preserving knowledge like three and four crop rotations for recovery should be doable, though it could be a real crapshoot what language(s) people might be literate in. Lots of pictures and diagrams with simple words in multiple languages might be best, and could also provide something of a Rosetta Stone to allow the readers to unlock other surviving texts.
The big problem I see is one I have touched on previously. Lots of older simpler tech is built on skills and processes that have fallen out of knowledge because of disuse. The survivors are going to be faced with recovering those first before getting into stuff we often consider long obsolete. This kinda came up in a tangent on an Althouse thread about Elon Musk yesterday. Evidently he has revived the use of casting for his car frames, and the poster made the claim that casting had *never* been used for objects that large. This is pure bunkum as steam locomotive frames like those for UP4014 weighing up to 45 tons were regularly cast in the early 20th century. Casting objects that large stopped not only because we stopped using steam but also because of advances in welding techniques. The tech has been discarded and almost lost in less than 100 years.
I see I intended to buy this book back then, but as far as I can recall I never did. No matter, I've sent off for it now.
If this line of thinking intrigues you, you might enjoy the series of four books starting with "World made by Hand" by Howard Kunstler. It is an extended thought experiment (which sounds awful, but its a good story well told) on another of Kunstler's books "The Long Emergency." Basically, what happens when the oil finally does run out? His stories encompass many of the issues you and your commentors touch on: the rebuilding of lost skills, the mining of remains, etc. I think much of what Kunstler puts down along these lines is quite plausible, and so I've decided not to get too worked up about Artificial Intelligence. Once the oil runs out (which I think could well happen in my children's lifetime) there is no electricity to power the chips, so...whatever. Everything old is new again!
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