If you were one of the few survivors of some sort of global apocalypse, what sort of knowledge would you need to rebuild a functioning society? Building an iphone isn’t exactly easy, and I think most of us would struggle with even more basic things like a lens (for science), a bike (for transportation), or a system of crop rotation that would keep sufficient nitrogen in the fields (essential for food), never mind something like a pottery kiln or steam engine.
The Knowledge has two goals. One, to teach future survivors how to rebuild a technologically advanced civilization, ideally advancing them as far as possible without creating things too difficult to repair or maintain (there’s no point in jets if you can’t repair jet engines). Two, to examine the fundamentals of science and technology that are very remote from most of us. To do so, Dartnell covers the basics of food, shelter, and water plus some more ambitious projects, explaining to the reader how to get an arc furnace going to work metals; recover antibiotics, X-rays, steam engines, and photography; and reproduce electricity and cement, trying to strike a balance between useful detail for the survivor and overwhelming a casual reader.
The book is interesting even given the low odds of an apocalypse (depending on time scale – just ask this documentary produced by Stephen Hawking), and it’s even better as a way to provoke a thought experiment on what you think should be passed on. Theory of atoms? Evolution? How to make cement or grow food? Chemistry? As a social scientist myself, something I wondered is the role of social invention in all this. Are there social technologies that should be passed on? The Knowledge mentions only physical tech, but what about how to design a democracy, the importance of trade, or a la Steven Pinker, how to restrain violence? Overall, though sometimes a bit heavy into the detail of engineering that I must confess I skimmed, the basics of the technologies that underpin our society have shaped the way we live, the way we talk, and the way we think. Dartnell does an excellent job highlighting all of these, from how we say o’clock to show we mean clock time, not solar time, to the advantages of golf cart batteries over car batteries. Read it to learn more about the basic technologies we use, but whether you read it or not it’s interesting to think about what you would want to pass on.
Disclosure: I read The Knowledge as a free advance reader copy – it is released on April 3rd. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). You never know when such knowledge might be handy!
Interesting! Technology is ubiquitous nowadays and I think it could be argued that knowledge is increasingly siloed, making individuals within a society more inter-dependent…my initial thought is that Individuals from early hunter-gatherer societies were probably better equipped to survive a post-apocalypse era!
That said, I’m not wanting to make an argument against technology. Every innovation reflects either a societal need or value (perhaps early innovations are born of need and subsequent developments and improvements reflect values?). So the methodologist in me wants to ask: how do we decide (and who should decide?) which innovations should be preserved and passed on? What – as Nick alludes to – should a ‘functioning society’ look like? The answer would determine which technologies we should pass on.
On a lighter note, I’ve been imaging a future in which paper books have been long obsolete – museums displaying only holographic replicas of the ‘paper book’ – and wondering: would the authors’ instructions on how to create and capture electricity or build a computer be accessible to the post-apocalypse survivor?
A great point! Worse yet, paper is nice because it doesn’t decay as quickly; not only is it hard to read technological storage without a computer or whatever, but it also breaks down more quickly. I’ve heard computer scientists complain that we have more of the writings of Aristotle than we do of some of the founders of AI in the 1950s, all of whom wrote on technology that is now obsolete.
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