What I find interesting is that many (if not all) people who buy this book aren't really anticipating having to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead they're more likely interested in learning about the essentials and fundamentals of society in this dire frame. It almost seems like a "500 things you should know" book dressed up with a more serious tone.
One thing that disturbs people about Earth Abides is its incredible humbling realism about the human condition. People who read it come away profoundly unnerved by the idea that civilization is not something guaranteed to come into existence if we lose it and that it requires an enormous convergence of many different kinds of stimulus to create the energies needed within a race of men to bring it into being. Even the most gifted races of people on the Earth can barely hold it together in the best of times, George Stewart shows us how easily it can all fall apart and remain in a primeval condition for untold generations.
There's a good possibility that, even with all our current knowledge, we could not reboot civilization because we've tapped much of the Earth's easily-accessible oil.
Wow, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work! I just re-read Ecclesiastes 5 minutes before reading your post -- and in the opening lines it says (KJV translation), "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." In my previous readings, I had never thought about the phrase "the earth abides" but in this morning's reading I did, and now I just saw it used here in the book title! :)
(PS: yeah, I know this isn't a super on-target tech web 2.0 scalable infrastructure comment like most on HN -- I'm just always in awe of baader-meinhof at work!) :)
And I was utterly amazed at the instructions it had for building almost so many different things. I also have an old physics book from the 60s that covers a ton of electrical and mechanical engineering concepts in a pretty basic manner.
Niven used a similar idea for the Library on the Pak Protector homeworld (Protector) for persisting knowledge through constant warfare.
And with David Gerrold (who wrote The Trouble with Tribbles Star Trek episode), The Flying Sorcerers, with "pull up" lines: needing to make the things to make the other things. (Niven's Ringworld also has a problem with restarting civilization: no ore beneath the surface - though, why not use rusted cars etc?)
Games like Civilization arguably also use this idea, with their tree/graph of technologies.
A Fire Upon the Deep (FUP, Vinge) does a little of this, also talks of restoring technology in the Slownness as a hobby of Uni Depts.
It's always reminded me of people in the Renaissance wondering in awe at ancient greek civilization (and even today, we use many of their ideas, particularly civic/municipal/government - arguably, a kind of "technology", a way of organizing people).
FUP also notes there are some very simple mechanisms that aren't discovered until technology has progressed well beyond what was needed (because the principle needed to understand them was very advanced). IIRC the example was a torsional quantum antennae (with I assume is related to a waveguide antennae).
Dragon's Egg (Forward) has the fascinating idea that it's more important to let people know that something is possible, than to explicitly show them how. Because then they understand it fully for themselves.
I think also, it has far superior effect-per-information: as another commenter said, you can't really fit all of modern technology into one book.
There was another movie/short film that I vaguely remember with protagonist arguing same thing (with a woman on train?), that inventions are simply inevitable once we reach appropriate technological level. Radio and telephone were cited as examples with multiple inventors popping at the same time all over the world.
Humans beat up on some invading aliens that got their interstellar tech from one such reboot library, and then go and invade Earth. We win because their knowledge is deep but narrow, and we exploit that.
If it's literal bits etched into stone, wouldn't it still be digital (the way sections of a disk platter having a particular polarity is digital)? Analog would be etching the resultant data in graphical form into the rock. I'm not sure what to call ASCII art carved into rock, tho.
Are you thinking that the digits should be physically unconnected solid objects? That would be an unconventional definition, not the one used by computer scientists and engineers.
The idea on principle is nice, but silly to assume that you can sum up human knowledge in one book.
Think about the amount of literature people have to read to became doctors, programmers, engineers, think about "re-inventing" electricity and computers, the world might be re-built but it would take so many generations and it would most definitely look nothing like our.
I think it might be more interesting to try to publish a book or collection of books that assumes the knowledge is lost, but will preserve the ability to rebuild. Basically, how to get from raw materials to modern technologies as quickly as possible. We could then study those objects to rebuild the knowledge.
We need to record proper methods of thought (rhetoric, logic, epistemology, scientific experiment, engineering), not just recipes to build things. If we have the right approach we can do anything from scratch -- we'd just go through a Second Renaissance.
Wow, this book seems cool. I plan on checking it out. However, I couldn't help but think that this book presumes a certain amount of knowledge that I think would likely be absent by the time the book is recovered.
I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."
It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].
As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.
I believe historically that was achieved with stone tools. So you make some stone axes, hatchets, adzes, chisels, etc. You use those to bootstrap a basic metallurgy setup, including chopping the trees for charcoal.
I think energy is the bigger challenge. In Britain in the 1600s, for example, the growth rate of trees couldn't keep up with the demand for charcoal. That was one of the factors that led to the widespread mining of coal, which previously had not been a major energy source in Britain.
The easily mineable fossil fuels are pretty much depleted now. We rely on advanced technology to extract the fossil fuels that power us today. A rebooted civilization might be stuck with charcoal. In which case its energy usage would be capped by the growth rate of the forests.
A newly primitive society would use at least an order of magnitude less energy. I think coal would be easy enough to come by (if you live in Appalachia), but petrochemicals would be troube.
Is there still plenty of coal that's easy to extract with primitive technology? If so, why hasn't it already been mined? (I would think the low-hanging fruit would go first.)
The nice thing about coal is that you really just need a pickaxe and a bucket to mine it, and it's relatively close to the earth. Keep in mind that an Industrial scale coal mine needs to have massive veins in order to be efficient, so they aren't really interested in the smaller veins - but there is enough coal out there to jumpstart a new civilization many times over.
One of the things that I think would be essential for an effort like this is a reference that describes the pivotal experiments and resulting insights that led us to our current level of scientific knowledge. To me, those accumulated inductive leaps of genius or luck are the real inheritance of our civilization.
Does anyone know if this book dives into that, or if not is there any other prepackaged "this is how science got here" kind of resource out there?
The best I know of in one coherent resource is the History of Science series of lectures by Lawrence Principe at Johns Hopkins, published by The Teaching Company:
Or one could capture methods of thinking that define and support science, so that one could fuel the Nth Renaissance, like Aristotle's works fueled the (Original) Renaissance.
Presumably, any apocalypse would result in a significant reduction of human population, so I'd say running out of resources is not the primary problem. More like being able to use them
I assume you are talking about easily extractable oil. That is getting harder to find without extreme technology.
You used to be able to find oil in Pennsylvania/Texas/California by waking around with high heels. These days you would want a map of Saudi Arabian oil fields that are known but not tapped. Drilling there will still produce shallow wells that produce gushers.
Slightly OT, but I'd love any suggestions for books/movies that deal with this topic. Most post-apocalypse media deals with coping with stupid stuff like Zombies, but I'd love to read/watch more stuff towards how humans would deal with rebuilding our society. Would we keep Democracy?
Terry Nation (BBC, creator of the Daleks) created a series in the 70s, called _survivors_ that dealt with much of this. Perhaps a little more human drama than what you're looking for, but gripping.
John Christopher was an author of adolescent science fiction that frequently dealt with post apocalyptic societies. "Empty World" has been my favorite book forever.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel where, after a nuclear war, a Catholic monastery transcribing technical texts (they do not understand) over many generations.
Also, check out the foxfire books. It is very different style and different purpose, I guess.
From Amazon:
'"In the late 1960s, Eliot Wigginton and his students created the magazine Foxfire in an effort to record and preserve the traditional folk culture of the Southern Appalachians. This is the original book compilation of Foxfire material which introduces Aunt Arie and her contemporaries and includes log cabin building, hog dressing, snake lore, mountain crafts and food, and "other affairs of plain living."'
I learned quite a bit about living in a different 'time', good learnin'.
This immediately reminded me of a quote from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams (4th in the trilogy of 5):
"The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services."
Yes- the society he found himself in had never thought to put meat on bread, so as Sandwich Maker he took on a kind of master craftsman/minor deity role.
I was purposely trying to avoid the comedy element, as although it was written as such, I recall at the time it was a very enlightening point for me. How little most of humanity could rebuild things from first principles.
Wikipedia. Put onto a device with a nonmechanical hard drive using technology that will last for at least 1,000 years. Said device would have to be powered with kinetic energy so that someone could press a pump with their hand or foot to give it power. I would imagine that the hardware could be made less complex and more durable by stripping it down to perform only the purpose of displaying text on a screen. We should develop and perfect this technology and scatter it around the world.
I can't think of anything that's more useful than all of the world's knowledge in a small box. The science, research and technology articles alone could turn men into gods of their time, imparting the knowledge necessary to wage war or enthrall most people. Can you imagine if modern wikipedia were dropped off anywhere in the world 1,000 years ago? The world would be completely different. Plus we'd be able to transmit so much of global culture, in different languages no less. If society was completely reset they would still have a knowledge of breaking bad and mash, plus all of the classics of today. Preserving wikipedia for centuries has to be one of the most beneficial things we can do for future societies, no matter what happens.
Specifically about this book, I heard a radio interview where the author said that the technology he felt was most important is the lathe. It's like the ycombinator of tools, you can use a partially completed lathe to make another lathe. He mentioned a story about a machinist who was able to start with one lathe and raw materials, and end up with an entire shop full of different tools. I almost went out and bought a cheap lathe, just the zombie apocalypse starts anytime soon.
I think it would be particularly useful to include change history and discussion pages. The struggle of how we arrived at this apparent consensus, and the evidence that it was just a snapshot of a (mysteriously and suddenly stilled?) roiling river of debate, could be nearly as valuable as the facts themselves.
I doubt it. How important would the heavily debated subjects be to a post-apocalyptic society? I'd imagine they would care much more about husbandry, carpentry, metallurgy, and primitive industrial chemistry than whether or not X person was notable enough to deserve a page or precisely how long Colbert managed to keep the page about the extinct elephant altered.
Whilst I don't disagree with your point, I recall that for an enormously long time so much weight was put into the works of ancient Greeks that we literally missed the evidence of our own senses[1]. An understanding on the part of our hypothetical post-apocalypse recovery that the knowledge of their ancestors, whilst enormously useful, is not an absolute and is open to correction, would help them avoid making that mistake themselves. Sure, perhaps not the history of a page on something trivial, but something to keep the knowledge of the ancients being seen as immutable.
[1] The example I can't find, so I can't be sure I remember this correctly, but an ancient Greek writer described an insect as having a number of legs that it quite clearly didn't, and wasn't corrected for a long, long time.
Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies.
The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read?
I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently?
The obvious solution here is a reboot civilization wiki. There could even be fun discussions about what to put first, the assumed technological level of the target audience, etc. I think many people would find this extremely engaging... if there was an initial thing in place, with some aspects right, but, more importantly, some aspects wrong, to criticize...
> The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly.
Does not matter much. Civilization is not rebuilt in a day. Even if it took a few generations for them to understand the internal organization, they'd still be ahead.
That said, a "book" with that purpose would be much better, indeed.
We would carve Wikipedia's most important articles in stone.
Wikipedia has a set of 1000 "vital articles" that would be a major asset in rebuilding civilization.[1] Of course, the internal details of the encyclopedia's organization, its Talk pages, esoteric editorial conflicts, Pokemon pages, etc. are irrelevant and would be omitted for a version of the encyclopedia put onto truly durable, readable storage media.
A few years ago, while talking with a Wikipedian about the Long Now Foundation,[2] he said something that has stuck with me:
"Who says it's not in the Wikimedia Foundation's mandate to commission certain articles to be etched in stone?"
I would love to see that goal advertized in one of the WMF's annual fundraising banners. It would be so much more awesome than investing in improved default typography (not that the exquisite new typography [3] isn't nice).
Naturally, there would need to be several language versions and many copies of the stone-etched Wikipedia articles. A more durable storage medium than stone would also be a good idea. And having the articles assumes people in the post-apocalyptic world could read an existing major language to a reasonable degree. Having a gradated table of contents, such that more fundamental and simple concepts came before sophisticated ones (e.g. 'sanitation' before 'vaccine', 'arithmetic' before 'calculus') would also obviously be helpful.
Most of the vital articles that would help in rebuilding civilization [1] are in bad condition. Maybe this discussion will inspire someone to push one of those articles to a better state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles. The vital articles are divided into 11 categories. Of these, the following 300 or so articles from 6 of those categories would probably be the most helpful in rebuilding civilization:
- Everyday life: clothing, cooking, job, writing, and various major languages.
- Geography: city, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Jakarta, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Rome, Sao Paulo, Singapore, country, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Arctic, Middle East, sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, lake, river, land, desert, forest, glacier, mountain, Alps, Andes, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains
- Health and medicine: common cold, influenza, pneumonia, burn, tuberculosis, ageing, antibiotic, vaccine, sanitation
- Science: scientific method, nature, astronomy, asteroid, comet, orbit, Solar System, Sun, Earth, Moon, Universe, biology, life, death, extinction, anatomy, brain, blood, heart, eye, immune system, liver, lung, muscle, skin, skeleton, reproduction, male, female, pregnancy, sex, botany, cell, ecology, evolution, genetics, heredity, organism and the 21 articles within (e.g. bird, insect, animal, human, dog, horse, plant, seed), virus, chemistry, alloy, bronze, steel, atom, chemical bond, salt, water, chemical element, carbon, iron, oxygen, silicon, chemical reaction, metal, mineral, molecule, periodic table, history of the Earth, geology, earthquake, rock, volcano, climate, cloud, flood, global warming, rain, season, weather, wind, map, soil, physics, electron, proton, photon, classical mechanics, energy, force, gravitation, heat, temperature, light, magnet, mass, matter, measurement, sound, thermodynamics, time, day, year
How can present geography help as a vital category after a large earth reforging asteroid impact or any other heavy geological disaster? Wouldn't the tectonic plates be shattered and reconfigured?
The present geography will only serve as a history or even mythology.
Geography is the science of the mechanics that drive our world. Learning to understand those, however different they may be after a disaster will become vital if you plan to rehabitate the whole world.
Have you ever tried learning math, or physics, from wikipedia? It's nearly impossible. I agree that preserving some sort of encyclopedic form of knowledge is a great idea, and that wikipedia is the best we have at the moment, but in the event of apocalypse, it would be pretty much useless.
Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.
Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering.
Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them.
Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered.
WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks.
I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there.
There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing.
Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars.
Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.
It sounds like you are saying Science would have put faith into the accuracy of a single book. The methods of discovery are as important as the discovery itself.
Remember that a large part of the reverence that we have for "the ancients" is because there was a long stretch of time during the middle ages in which old knowledge that had disappeared was rediscovered. The scholastics/etc. were all about finding old books from Greek/Roman times and learning from them, much more than creating new discoveries.
And this made sense at the time, as it would if all of our technology and knowledge were gone.
Of course Wikipedia is not meant as a rebuilding civilization guide, but it's the most useful site I've seen for exploring new things and rehashing the things you know.
I've tried learning both math and physics from the Wikipedia and most of the time I've enjoyed it. If I'm feeling frustrated on an article(I know the feeling you have described) it usually means I should read about more basic stuff first (the stuff which is conveniently linked in the article for me).
What do you think useful information about electricity should look like?
If current Wikipedia is printed in a book form, it will span about 2000 books, each with 1000 A4 size pages and still not including diagrams, images and equations.
But Wikipedia is extremely shallow.
A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise.
But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages.
I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.
I had an idea once to make something like this, but on a much more (ridiculously) grand scale. The basic concept was "Society from First Principles", sort of a cross between Boy Scout Handbook, Wikipedia and Robert's Rules of Order.
Just as an example of the scale I'm talking about: I wanted the book itself to be useful / durable, printed on something like Tyvek so it would last through more than the average paperback. The first thing I was thinking of trying to figure out is establishing a measurement system under the assumption that all existing weights & measures disappeared and you would have to recreate them. Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight that could be used a a reference. Really, really first-principles stuff, like with only wilderness / stone-age type tools available.
I know I wanted to have different volumes, from basic (individual) survival through communities to nations. Volume titles were something like "Survive", "Thrive", "Rebuild", "Expand".
An example excerpt:
That cottage had stood for five hundred years. Thatch is the thick woven straw that makes the roof. The walls are a mixture of clay and straw called cob, or sometimes tabby. The material varies, as well as the name. Cob, or tabby, is a poor man's masonry. To make it, you mix a structural material -- like straw, corn stubble, or oyster shells -- with clay or earth. It makes a solid building material. In one form, we daub mud onto it. Wattles, by the way, are twigs woven together.
Re measurement, this book is an interesting read -- sort of an analysis and attempted reconstruction of the techniques used for furniture building in the preindustrial era (lots of ratios, transfer of measurements without actually putting them into units, et cetera): http://lostartpress.com/products/by-hand-eye-1
When I was in bootcamp (decades ago) we used it for important things like measuring how much of a gap there was supposed to be between the top of your mattress and the top of your top sheet: 1 BJM. Sadly, the rest of physics were not derived from the dimensions of the book.
This reminds me of a physics & engineering teacher I had in high school. He insisted that we use calculus to derive all of the kinematic equations. I think that rebooting society should function in a similar manner. We should remember the key laws, discoveries and methods and then rebuild society better than it was before.
Bought this book (the kindle version of course, with a silly grin) and it actually addresses (in the first chapter) how having a hard-copy version of Wikipedia is not adequate at all, and it wasn't designed for the task of rebooting society/technology.
First, coat a sheet of paper with egg whites containing some dissolved salt, and allow it to dry. Now dissolve some silver in nitric acid, which will oxidize the metal to soluble silver nitrate, and spread the solution over your prepared paper.
Sodium thiosulfate is the fixing agent still used today and is relatively easy to prepare. Bubble sulfur gas through a solution of soda or caustic soda
Where do I get gaseous sulfer? How do I make caustic soda?
Setting aside the choice of photography as a "critical development" (vs metallurgy and the like)... this guide needs to be a lot more comprehensive if a layperson is expected to use it. I mean... I'm a decently-smart guy (PhD in electronics/robotics). I could build decent electrical circuits (generators, point-contact radios, basic batteries) from scavenged bulk materials, but I'm already lost in this chemistry. :-/
The photography chapter is from the middle of the book. It reads like the required components were already covered in earlier chapters.
Edit: chapter 5 covers making sulfuric acid and then describes making nitric acid. It doesn't go into detail other than reacting sulfuric acid with saltpeter.
I assumed that stuff was covered elsewhere in the book. I sure hope it came with safety protocols, as well details on how to make yourself some acid-proof gauntlets and why you should work in a ventilated space. But this is really more of a 'yay science' book.
I really like this idea and it got me thinking about a lesser, but still bad, disaster:
If all computers were to disappear tomorrow (let's say a super-EMP, or something) how could we quickly restart the digital age? As in, what source code/chip designs would we really wish we had on paper somewhere, so a relatively small team could get modern computing going quickly?
From the source code side, I'm thinking the opcodes necessary for a Forth compiler, a compiler for some restricted version of C in Forth (to keep the source code size down), a quality C compiler written in the simple-C and the source code for some vaguely POSIX compliant system (MINIX, maybe?)
I'm curious if it's at all feasible to put that much source code on paper...
You mean we have the opportunity to rewrite everything with our accumulated design know-how without having backwards-compatibility as a requirement and knowing exactly where the puck is going at all times?
Gimme the damn EMP, I'll set it off myself. I can't think of a more fun way to spend ten years.
The computer hardware would be a real problem. Sadly most computer architectures are guarded as a trade secrete. And even early PCs like Apple I and the one that Bill Gates wrote his first BASIC for, were using off-the-shelf CPUs. One of the last wire-based (non ICs) computers with high speed performace (~ 500 MHz) were the Cray super computers. It seems most of the details are lost in history. We should start to reverse engineer the museum pieces and write the knowledge down on paper. Probably it would also help us with current gen CPU design problems.
The software side will be easier. Knowing ASM of the available CPU architecture one could write a C, BASIC or Fortran compiler from scratch and write a operating system either by using source code from books (like Minix), etc.
134 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)
http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abides-George-R-Stewart/dp/03454...
From one of the reviews:
One thing that disturbs people about Earth Abides is its incredible humbling realism about the human condition. People who read it come away profoundly unnerved by the idea that civilization is not something guaranteed to come into existence if we lose it and that it requires an enormous convergence of many different kinds of stimulus to create the energies needed within a race of men to bring it into being. Even the most gifted races of people on the Earth can barely hold it together in the best of times, George Stewart shows us how easily it can all fall apart and remain in a primeval condition for untold generations.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3L6EVT6CXOAFM/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...
(PS: yeah, I know this isn't a super on-target tech web 2.0 scalable infrastructure comment like most on HN -- I'm just always in awe of baader-meinhof at work!) :)
http://www.amazon.com/Instrument-Engineers-Handbook-Vol-Meas...
And I was utterly amazed at the instructions it had for building almost so many different things. I also have an old physics book from the 60s that covers a ton of electrical and mechanical engineering concepts in a pretty basic manner.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye#Motie_cul...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
And with David Gerrold (who wrote The Trouble with Tribbles Star Trek episode), The Flying Sorcerers, with "pull up" lines: needing to make the things to make the other things. (Niven's Ringworld also has a problem with restarting civilization: no ore beneath the surface - though, why not use rusted cars etc?) Games like Civilization arguably also use this idea, with their tree/graph of technologies. A Fire Upon the Deep (FUP, Vinge) does a little of this, also talks of restoring technology in the Slownness as a hobby of Uni Depts.
It's always reminded me of people in the Renaissance wondering in awe at ancient greek civilization (and even today, we use many of their ideas, particularly civic/municipal/government - arguably, a kind of "technology", a way of organizing people).
FUP also notes there are some very simple mechanisms that aren't discovered until technology has progressed well beyond what was needed (because the principle needed to understand them was very advanced). IIRC the example was a torsional quantum antennae (with I assume is related to a waveguide antennae).
Dragon's Egg (Forward) has the fascinating idea that it's more important to let people know that something is possible, than to explicitly show them how. Because then they understand it fully for themselves.
I think also, it has far superior effect-per-information: as another commenter said, you can't really fit all of modern technology into one book.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xinb18_outer-limits-final-e...
There was another movie/short film that I vaguely remember with protagonist arguing same thing (with a woman on train?), that inventions are simply inevitable once we reach appropriate technological level. Radio and telephone were cited as examples with multiple inventors popping at the same time all over the world.
Humans beat up on some invading aliens that got their interstellar tech from one such reboot library, and then go and invade Earth. We win because their knowledge is deep but narrow, and we exploit that.
I laughed myself when the default search result was for a Kindle version :-)
A short film[1] based on Ken MacLeod's short story "The Surface of Last Scattering".[2]
[1] http://scatteredfilm.com/ [2] http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-surface-of-last-s...
Those who have little comprehension of what cataclysmic events do to digital storage.
Are you thinking that the digits should be physically unconnected solid objects? That would be an unconventional definition, not the one used by computer scientists and engineers.
Think about the amount of literature people have to read to became doctors, programmers, engineers, think about "re-inventing" electricity and computers, the world might be re-built but it would take so many generations and it would most definitely look nothing like our.
I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."
It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].
As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.
Apart from that: metallurgy.
Very few modern things can be made with one's bare hands and without tools. Tools that help build more tools would be essential for re-bootstrapping.
(Chopping the first trees so that you would have something to make fire so you could melt metal would be very hard)
I think energy is the bigger challenge. In Britain in the 1600s, for example, the growth rate of trees couldn't keep up with the demand for charcoal. That was one of the factors that led to the widespread mining of coal, which previously had not been a major energy source in Britain.
The easily mineable fossil fuels are pretty much depleted now. We rely on advanced technology to extract the fossil fuels that power us today. A rebooted civilization might be stuck with charcoal. In which case its energy usage would be capped by the growth rate of the forests.
http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=coal_reser...
Does anyone know if this book dives into that, or if not is there any other prepackaged "this is how science got here" kind of resource out there?
Some really cool music in it too, featuring Edgard Varese!
http://www.thegreatcourses.co.uk/tgc/Courses/course_detail.a...
You used to be able to find oil in Pennsylvania/Texas/California by waking around with high heels. These days you would want a map of Saudi Arabian oil fields that are known but not tapped. Drilling there will still produce shallow wells that produce gushers.
John Christopher was an author of adolescent science fiction that frequently dealt with post apocalyptic societies. "Empty World" has been my favorite book forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Anathem is a Neal Stephenson novel about (again) monastic communities preserving knowledge over hundreds or thousands of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
From Amazon:
'"In the late 1960s, Eliot Wigginton and his students created the magazine Foxfire in an effort to record and preserve the traditional folk culture of the Southern Appalachians. This is the original book compilation of Foxfire material which introduces Aunt Arie and her contemporaries and includes log cabin building, hog dressing, snake lore, mountain crafts and food, and "other affairs of plain living."'
I learned quite a bit about living in a different 'time', good learnin'.
"The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services."
I can't think of anything that's more useful than all of the world's knowledge in a small box. The science, research and technology articles alone could turn men into gods of their time, imparting the knowledge necessary to wage war or enthrall most people. Can you imagine if modern wikipedia were dropped off anywhere in the world 1,000 years ago? The world would be completely different. Plus we'd be able to transmit so much of global culture, in different languages no less. If society was completely reset they would still have a knowledge of breaking bad and mash, plus all of the classics of today. Preserving wikipedia for centuries has to be one of the most beneficial things we can do for future societies, no matter what happens.
Specifically about this book, I heard a radio interview where the author said that the technology he felt was most important is the lathe. It's like the ycombinator of tools, you can use a partially completed lathe to make another lathe. He mentioned a story about a machinist who was able to start with one lathe and raw materials, and end up with an entire shop full of different tools. I almost went out and bought a cheap lathe, just the zombie apocalypse starts anytime soon.
[1] The example I can't find, so I can't be sure I remember this correctly, but an ancient Greek writer described an insect as having a number of legs that it quite clearly didn't, and wasn't corrected for a long, long time.
Gah. Please, no. (I am a Wikipedian, and I can see that it is going to take YEARS to clean out all the ideological and commercial point-of-view-pushing crap in Wikipedia today.[1] I try to do what clean-up I can, but I am just one guy doing Wikipedia editing in my recreational time.) Most of the comments I see about Wikipedia here on Hacker News from people who have actually edited Wikipedia relate various complaints about its editorial policies.
The practical problem for people trying to rebuild civilization from Wikipedia would be finding the structure of its internal organization to get to the most needed information rapidly. (Wikipedia is not organized around building civilization--not in its editing culture, and not in any other respect.) And here on Hacker News where we often see our fellow participants desiring a tl;dr summary of a blog post, why not go for conciseness and use a reference tool much shorter than Wikipedia to rebuild civilization? That's what the book under review in the submission here is all about: a short book focused on rebuilding civilization with the most essential information in an organized format. Have you actually looked up how to rebuild civilization on Wikipedia? What would be the first article to read?
I do like the idea of the book under review in the submission here, as the author is thinking deeply about the issue of preserving the essential knowledge to rebuild civilization, and he is curating his book with that purpose in mind. The review here looks favorable, and I think I should read the book for enjoyment--I don't actually expect to need to rebuild civilization. I do expect to need to improve Wikipedia for years. Have you joined in on that project recently?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WeijiBaikeBianji#Pre...
Does not matter much. Civilization is not rebuilt in a day. Even if it took a few generations for them to understand the internal organization, they'd still be ahead.
That said, a "book" with that purpose would be much better, indeed.
Wikipedia has a set of 1000 "vital articles" that would be a major asset in rebuilding civilization.[1] Of course, the internal details of the encyclopedia's organization, its Talk pages, esoteric editorial conflicts, Pokemon pages, etc. are irrelevant and would be omitted for a version of the encyclopedia put onto truly durable, readable storage media.
A few years ago, while talking with a Wikipedian about the Long Now Foundation,[2] he said something that has stuck with me:
"Who says it's not in the Wikimedia Foundation's mandate to commission certain articles to be etched in stone?"
I would love to see that goal advertized in one of the WMF's annual fundraising banners. It would be so much more awesome than investing in improved default typography (not that the exquisite new typography [3] isn't nice).
Naturally, there would need to be several language versions and many copies of the stone-etched Wikipedia articles. A more durable storage medium than stone would also be a good idea. And having the articles assumes people in the post-apocalyptic world could read an existing major language to a reasonable degree. Having a gradated table of contents, such that more fundamental and simple concepts came before sophisticated ones (e.g. 'sanitation' before 'vaccine', 'arithmetic' before 'calculus') would also obviously be helpful.
Most of the vital articles that would help in rebuilding civilization [1] are in bad condition. Maybe this discussion will inspire someone to push one of those articles to a better state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles. The vital articles are divided into 11 categories. Of these, the following 300 or so articles from 6 of those categories would probably be the most helpful in rebuilding civilization:
- Everyday life: clothing, cooking, job, writing, and various major languages.
- Geography: city, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Jakarta, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Rome, Sao Paulo, Singapore, country, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Arctic, Middle East, sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, lake, river, land, desert, forest, glacier, mountain, Alps, Andes, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains
- Health and medicine: common cold, influenza, pneumonia, burn, tuberculosis, ageing, antibiotic, vaccine, sanitation
- Science: scientific method, nature, astronomy, asteroid, comet, orbit, Solar System, Sun, Earth, Moon, Universe, biology, life, death, extinction, anatomy, brain, blood, heart, eye, immune system, liver, lung, muscle, skin, skeleton, reproduction, male, female, pregnancy, sex, botany, cell, ecology, evolution, genetics, heredity, organism and the 21 articles within (e.g. bird, insect, animal, human, dog, horse, plant, seed), virus, chemistry, alloy, bronze, steel, atom, chemical bond, salt, water, chemical element, carbon, iron, oxygen, silicon, chemical reaction, metal, mineral, molecule, periodic table, history of the Earth, geology, earthquake, rock, volcano, climate, cloud, flood, global warming, rain, season, weather, wind, map, soil, physics, electron, proton, photon, classical mechanics, energy, force, gravitation, heat, temperature, light, magnet, mass, matter, measurement, sound, thermodynamics, time, day, year
- Technology: all 109 articles
- Mathematics: arithmetic, addition, multiplication, fraction, logarithm, combinatorics, geometry, angle, trigonometry, area, line, point, circle, triangle, sphere, volume, function, calculus, number, 0, pi, e, integer, probability, statistics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
[3] z3phyr ↗ How can present geography help as a vital category after a large earth reforging asteroid impact or any other heavy geological disaster? Wouldn't the tectonic plates be shattered and reconfigured? dignati ↗ Geography is the science of the mechanics that drive our world. Learning to understand those, however different they may be after a disaster will become vital if you plan to rehabitate the whole world.
The present geography will only serve as a history or even mythology.
Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.
Have you heard of Simple English Wikipedia? It does describe (e.g.) electricity in a useful way.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity
Give the contents of wikipedia to our own civilization a century ago and watch the outstanding progress. A lot of theories wouldn't need to be tested, once the accuracy of wikipedia was determined. Things like penicilin wouldn't have to be discovered by accident. Several chemical reactions, which are named after their inventors, wouldn't need discovering.
Several open questions would be answered in an instant. Heck, give wikipedia to us a decade ago, we hadn't even discovered exoplanets. That would tell us that they are out there, and the outlines of basic techniques to find them.
Even things like the best reentry shape for a spaceship. Or chemical elements previously undiscovered.
WRT that particular entry, it is in fact, very abstract. But give it to a university, no matter the tech level, they will figure it out, given time. There's a lot of missing information indeed, but people are very good at filling in the blanks.
I'll give you another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser . It is cryptic too, but remember that the laser, once conceived theoretically, didn't have a practical use. Now, we can't live without them. That entry lists the practical uses right there.
There are many, many more examples. My argument is that, while you cannot give wikipedia to someone and expect that a civilization will come out on the other end, the knowledge that is there is priceless. That would require work, but I bet any reasonable government would provide the necessary financing.
Oh, almost forgot, weaponry. It has several outlines for weapons. Heck, even the type of antenna best used for radar would be enough information to completely change the events of the World Wars.
Another thing I just remembered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter . Helicopters were attempted for decades with no success, it says right there in the history section. But someone came up with the idea of flexible rotors. There, my last phrase is enough to point a team to the solution, even if the details about materials, manufacturing methods and the calculations are missing. But I bet people can figure it out.
It sounds like you are saying Science would have put faith into the accuracy of a single book. The methods of discovery are as important as the discovery itself.
Remember that a large part of the reverence that we have for "the ancients" is because there was a long stretch of time during the middle ages in which old knowledge that had disappeared was rediscovered. The scholastics/etc. were all about finding old books from Greek/Roman times and learning from them, much more than creating new discoveries.
And this made sense at the time, as it would if all of our technology and knowledge were gone.
I've tried learning both math and physics from the Wikipedia and most of the time I've enjoyed it. If I'm feeling frustrated on an article(I know the feeling you have described) it usually means I should read about more basic stuff first (the stuff which is conveniently linked in the article for me).
What do you think useful information about electricity should look like?
But Wikipedia is extremely shallow.
A PHD typically requires study of 250 to 400 textbooks starting from Kindergarden (these are strictly course requirements). If you assume there are about 10,000 sub-sub fields of expertise for human kind (everything from sub-sub field in genetics to sub-sub field in airplane design) I think there may be about 1 million textbooks currently in print that covers pretty much every core expertise.
But again textbooks are not deep enough either. There are 1.3 million papers/research articles that gets published every year. A conservative estimate of all research articles ever published might be 50 million. That would be about about 250,000 printed books, each about 1000 pages.
I think we can comfortably say that most of the core human knowledge can be fit in to about 1 to 2 million printed books, each about of size 1000 pages.
Is way too big and does not actually contain most of the information which would be useful in such a scenario.
Just as an example of the scale I'm talking about: I wanted the book itself to be useful / durable, printed on something like Tyvek so it would last through more than the average paperback. The first thing I was thinking of trying to figure out is establishing a measurement system under the assumption that all existing weights & measures disappeared and you would have to recreate them. Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight that could be used a a reference. Really, really first-principles stuff, like with only wilderness / stone-age type tools available.
I know I wanted to have different volumes, from basic (individual) survival through communities to nations. Volume titles were something like "Survive", "Thrive", "Rebuild", "Expand".
Make sure to take some from: The Engines of Our Ingenuity http://www.uh.edu/engines/
An example excerpt: That cottage had stood for five hundred years. Thatch is the thick woven straw that makes the roof. The walls are a mixture of clay and straw called cob, or sometimes tabby. The material varies, as well as the name. Cob, or tabby, is a poor man's masonry. To make it, you mix a structural material -- like straw, corn stubble, or oyster shells -- with clay or earth. It makes a solid building material. In one form, we daub mud onto it. Wattles, by the way, are twigs woven together.
Re measurement, this book is an interesting read -- sort of an analysis and attempted reconstruction of the techniques used for furniture building in the preindustrial era (lots of ratios, transfer of measurements without actually putting them into units, et cetera): http://lostartpress.com/products/by-hand-eye-1
The US Navy issues the Bluejacket's Manual (BJM) to all new enlisted people. It's a How To Be a Sailor book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluejacket%27s_Manual
When I was in bootcamp (decades ago) we used it for important things like measuring how much of a gap there was supposed to be between the top of your mattress and the top of your top sheet: 1 BJM. Sadly, the rest of physics were not derived from the dimensions of the book.
http://blog.longnow.org/02009/04/14/all-you-need-to-jump-sta...
I pictured RAF / Special Forces handbooks. Describe clouds, knots, wildlife, foliage, etc.
Has the World Ended Yet?
Edit: Ahem ... http://hastheworldalreadyended.com/OK, scavenge a silver spoon. But now how do I get nitric acid? Google: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Nitric-acid-The-Complet... Yeah, that wasn't intuitive at all.
Sodium thiosulfate is the fixing agent still used today and is relatively easy to prepare. Bubble sulfur gas through a solution of soda or caustic soda
Where do I get gaseous sulfer? How do I make caustic soda?
Setting aside the choice of photography as a "critical development" (vs metallurgy and the like)... this guide needs to be a lot more comprehensive if a layperson is expected to use it. I mean... I'm a decently-smart guy (PhD in electronics/robotics). I could build decent electrical circuits (generators, point-contact radios, basic batteries) from scavenged bulk materials, but I'm already lost in this chemistry. :-/
Edit: chapter 5 covers making sulfuric acid and then describes making nitric acid. It doesn't go into detail other than reacting sulfuric acid with saltpeter.
If all computers were to disappear tomorrow (let's say a super-EMP, or something) how could we quickly restart the digital age? As in, what source code/chip designs would we really wish we had on paper somewhere, so a relatively small team could get modern computing going quickly?
From the source code side, I'm thinking the opcodes necessary for a Forth compiler, a compiler for some restricted version of C in Forth (to keep the source code size down), a quality C compiler written in the simple-C and the source code for some vaguely POSIX compliant system (MINIX, maybe?)
I'm curious if it's at all feasible to put that much source code on paper...
Gimme the damn EMP, I'll set it off myself. I can't think of a more fun way to spend ten years.
The software side will be easier. Knowing ASM of the available CPU architecture one could write a C, BASIC or Fortran compiler from scratch and write a operating system either by using source code from books (like Minix), etc.