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The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, by Lewis Dartnell
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How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch?
If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible—a guide for rebooting the world?
Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself?
Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover.
The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.
- Sales Rank: #30137 in Books
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .70" w x 5.40" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Booklist
Dartnell, a UK Space Agency research fellow and award-winning science writer, specializes in the field of astrobiology, including how microorganisms could survive on Mars. It’s no wonder, then, that this renowned young scientist is fascinated by survival tactics, the underlying theme of this ambitious inquiry into how people might be able to rebuild the world as we know it if an apocalypse came to pass. As much as any writer could cover the history of technology in 300 pages, Dartnell presents a good case. His account quickly progresses from raising crops to making soap, shearing and spinning wool, mining coal, generating electricity, and building radios. Of course, since this is all speculation, it’s hard to predict what people would be able to scavenge and what will be left intact or who might be on earth besides yourself. Dartnell doesn’t address questions of governing this survivors’ society or how people would collaborate on rebuilding or how hopeless some will feel without Google and smartphones. Still, Dartnell’s vision is a great start in understanding what it took to build our world. --Laurie Borman
Review
Wall Street Journal:
“‘The Knowledge" is a fascinating look at the basic principles of the most important technologies undergirding modern society… a fun read full of optimism about human ingenuity.”
Boston Globe:
“[Dartnell’s] plans may anticipate the destruction of our world, but embedded in them is the hope that there might be a better way to live in the pre-apocalyptic world we inhabit right now.”
New York Post:
“A stimulating read, a grand thought experiment on re-engineering the food, housing, clothing, heat, clean water and every other building block of civilization.”
Booklist:
“Dartnell’s vision is a great start in understanding what it took to build our world.”
The Times:
“This book is an extraordinary achievement. With lucidity and brevity, Dartnell explains the rudiments of a civilisation. It is a great read even if civilisation does not collapse. If it does, it will be the sacred text of the new world — Dartnell that world’s first great prophet.”
The Independent:
“The Knowledge is premised on an ingenious sleight of hand. Ostensibly a manual on rebuilding our technological life-support system after a global catastrophe, it is actually a glorious compendium of the knowledge we have lost in the living; the origins of the material fabric of our actual, unapocalyptic lives....The most inspiring book I’ve read in a long time.”
The Guardian:
“The Knowledge is a terrifically engrossing history of science and technology.... [A] cunningly packaged yet entertainingly serious essay in the history of practical ideas.”
Times Higher Education:
“A whirlwind tour of the history of human endeavour in terms of scientific and technological discovery.... Readers will certainly come away better informed, more knowledgeable about, and hopefully more interested in the fundamental science and technology necessary to rebuild a civilised society.”
The Daily Mail:
“Dartnell’s guide to surviving the apocalypse is as breezy and engaging as it is informative. I now know exactly what I’m going to do as soon as a mushroom cloud appears on the horizon. Leap in my golf cart and go straight round to Dartnell’s place.”
The Observer:
“A crash course in the scientific fundamentals underpinning modern-day living. The Knowledge impresses as a condensed history of scientific progress, and will pique curiosity among readers who regret daydreaming throughout school chemistry lessons.”
New Statesman:
“A crash course in the scientific fundamentals underpinning modern-day living. The Knowledge impresses as a condensed history of scientific progress, and will pique curiosity among readers who regret daydreaming throughout school chemistry lessons.”
Nature:
“The ultimate do-it-yourself guide to ‘rebooting’ human civilization. With scientific nous, Dartnell depicts probable environmental scenarios on a stricken Earth and offers putative survivors instruction in the technologies needed to craft a culture from the ground up. Many will thrill to this reminder of our species’ prodigious resilience.”
Seth Mnookin, New York Times bestselling author of The Panic Virus and associate director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing:
“A marvelously astounding work: In one graceful swoop, Lewis Dartnell takes our multi-layered, interconnected modern world, shows how fragile its scaffolding is, and then lays out a how-to guide for starting over from scratch. Imagine Zombieland told by Neil deGrasse Tyson and you'll get some sense of what a delight The Knowledge is to read.”
Ken MacLeod, author of Intrusion and Descent:
“Dartnell makes the technology and science of everyday life in our civilization fascinating and understandable. This book may or may not save your life but it'll certainly make it more interesting. This is the book we all wish we'd been given at school: the knowledge that makes everything else make sense."
Roger Highfield, journalist, author, and Science Museum executive:
“For all those terrified by runaway climate change, super-eruptions, planet-killer asteroids, doomsday viruses, nuclear terrorism and absolute domination by super-intelligent machines, Lewis Dartnell has written a long-overdue guide to what you should do after the apocalypse: an illuminating and entertaining vision of how to reboot life, civilization and everything. Dartnell’s vision of the survival of the smartest in a post-apocalyptic world offers a remarkable and panoramic view of how civilization actually works.”
S. M. Stirling, New York Times bestselling author of The Given Sacrifice:
"This book is useful if civilization collapses, and entertaining if it doesn't. After the cometary impact it may save your life, and if it doesn't at least you'll know why you perished."
About the Author
Dr. Lewis Dartnell is a UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester and writes regularly for New Scientist, BBC Focus, BBC Sky at Night, Cosmos, as well as newspapers including The Times, The Guardian, and The New York Times. He has won several awards, including the Daily Telegraph Young Science Writer Award. He also makes regular TV appearances and has been featured on BBC Horizon, Stargazing Live, Sky at Night, and numerous times on Discovery and the Science channel. His scientific research is in the field of astrobiology he works on how microorganisms might survive on the surface of Mars and the best ways to detect signs of ancient Martian life. He is thirty-two years old.
Most helpful customer reviews
74 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
Should Be Required Reading in Every School
By C. Richard
I always wondered what it would be like if all of a sudden we had some great disaster, and we'd have to reboot our civilization. This is way more complicated than it might first appear. I'm an engineer and though I know how to do a lot of things, I do not have the knowledge to make some very basic things that I would certainly like to have after such a disaster. At least not before I saw this book.
For example, could I make soap? If you think about it, soap would be really important in the dirty world we would find ourselves living in after the disaster. Fairly unsophisticated people made it for themselves for hundreds of years. Do you know the recipe? The ingredients might be fairly easy to find (assuming you know the list) with the possible exception of lye. Making that is a bit of a challenge - do you know how? Maybe going to a library that had paper books on science and engineering would help - if there was one around. Remember, the internet (and electricity) would be non-existent. If I had a copy of the book being reviewed here or had studied it very well before the disaster, I'd know how to make the lye needed. By the way, excess lye can result in some very harsh soap - that is another issue that has to be worked out by the soap maker. One more challenge in the brave new world perhaps.
There are numerous other basic things we take for granted that we'd have to figure out how to make after the disaster. Would you know what to do? I'm not so sure I would without having read this or a similar book(s), and I am an engineer. The book here provides us with the know how to make the basic items we would need in an initial reboot. It's nice to find a reference that tells us so much in so few pages.
Note that some reviewers felt this book was a little light on details, and they may have a point in some respects - it would probably not be enough for people who aren't at least a little "handy" in some sense. But, it does point people in the right direction in only one volume. After the disaster, it might be hard to lug around a set of books. In any case, the book reviewed here does provide perspective.
Some reviewers stated that there were some other single volume guides that would be more useful - Boy Scout manual, camping manuals, etc. This might be true in some respects, but I think not in others.
Given the (over) dependence we see today on things electronic, maybe this book (a paper copy) should be given out and be required reading in every school, just in case. Even if the disaster never happens, this would provide some perspective for the members of the technology dependent, yet largely technology ignorant society that we have become.
Recommended.
46 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
A "cure" for the too-specialized society?
By Dame Droiture
I am not a "Prepper," but I am really enjoying this book. Initially, Dartnell's goal to explain nearly every major technological aspect of human existence -- agriculture, textile-making, and even producing electricity -- seemed *too* ambitious, I think he does a very nice job ... particularly given the book's length. (One would expect a book like this to be made up of several massive tomes, not a 200+ page paperback.) Granted, a few of the rebuilding processes are outlined in very limited terms: I was perhaps able to grasp his section on purifying water, for example, if only because of the numerous "survivor-style" television shows I have seen (such as "Survivorman" with Les Stroud). But for other things, such as growing crops, I think that Dartnell's truncated explanations are the way to go. Since growing conditions will vary so much from place to place, there is probably not much he could do otherwise; thus he provides the reader with the very basics. For agriculture, again, how to separate the wheat from the chaff, how to grind it into flour, etc. These are things that most members of our very specialized societies have forgotten how to do, either from leaving the tasks to machines, or to other people.
In a way, the book is sort of a wake-up call for the very "problem" of specialization -- a ton of people who each know how to do only a few very particular tasks, most of which (at least in industrialized societies) will not help them one whit in the face of even a temporary disaster, environmental or otherwise. Given how much I actually learned while reading this book, I was retrospectively shocked (or even ashamed) to realize just how much I did not know -- just how many things I use each day were/are the results of the labor and knowledge of others. So if anything, the book really does underscore the continuing necessity to form "well-rounded" individuals: those who can find/make/grow at least the bare necessities of living. Like any good book, it underscores the importance of things I often take for granted, and it makes me want to learn even more.
124 of 142 people found the following review helpful.
Apocalypse soon
By Aaron C. Brown
I had expected this book to be a gedankenexperiment to determine if the technology underlying modern society can be reduced to a set of principles short enough to fit in one book and simple enough to be understood by one reader. Obviously it would take far more pages and complexity to record every detail of every process and device, but it is conceivable that essential knowledge could be organized into a tree that an isolated group of non-specialists could expand via research and tinkering into a functioning modern infrastructure.
The actual book is something different, but I'm not quite sure what it is. For one thing, this is no thought experiment, the author clearly expects some kind of catastrophic depopulation and social collapse (he mentions nuclear war and global pandemic as possibilities--the author is rooting for pandemic, I think because it damages only humans) or to be part of an inadequately supplied and badly trained exploration party (another planet or time travel on earth).
The first part of the book consists of the author's vivid descriptions of the apocalypse (his peaceful alternatives do not get the same attention). These are drawn from science fiction movies, sometimes explicitly, and as best I can tell, resemble no actual events. Plenty of cities have been abandoned (Pripyat is a particularly apt example) without conforming to the lurid sequences in the book. New Orleans after Katrina is cited as "a complete disintegration of law and order" and "the rapid degeneration of the normal social order and the outbreak of anarchy;" which leads the author to predict Mad Max scenarios. But none of this actually happened. There was tremendous official incompetence, but thousands of stories of small-scale heroism and altruism for every crime. The closest analogues to the author's nightmares outside Hollywood are genocidal pograms and civil wars--the product of organized groups with outside technology and resources, not scattered survivors of a holocaust stripped of their possessions.
Next the author gives his instructions for the immediate aftermath. The biggest problem here is his descriptions have nowhere near enough detail to be useful, and I'm pretty sure he's never actually tried any of the things he recommends. Any survival book, boy scouts handbook or camping manual will be far more help. Another problem is the eccentric coverage. He covers charcoal filtration, chemical treatment and sunlight disinfection of water (all of which require highly specific scavenging success and carry major risks) and suggests drinking from swimming pools and water heaters; but not collecting rainwater, drinking from wells or springs, or just going someplace with plenty of clean water.
Finally the book gets to the knowledge to rebuild the modern world. Here again there are no details, the author's main concern seems to be teaching the names of things, with a lot of attention to common English words derived from obsolete technology. Things are not arranged in any kind of order, for example his design for a primitive loom includes metal eyelets. Another issue is many of the technologies are not appropriate for the purpose. Norfolk crop rotation is described at length, but this is appropriate only for the south of England and was developed to allow intensive use of land to grow grain for export to other regions, using specialized equipment, optimized crops and animals and a highly trained labor force. A few thousand humans trying to rebuild modern society will have plenty of land and none of the prerequisites to make Norfolk rotation optimal. They might not be in the south of England (or if they started there might have decided to move to warmer climes to simplify survival). And in any case, they will have to solve their food production issues before building the infrastructure necessary to make grain export practical.
For all of those criticisms, this rebuilding part is reasonably interesting to read, and it represents the bulk of the book. If you think of it as essays on the history of technology loosely related to a survival theme, you should enjoy it and learn something. The writing is graceful and the author has an eye for interesting historical and scientific detail.
I can't recommend the book wholeheartedly to anyone. If you agree with the author's predictions of the future, you'll need a much better technology guide than this. If you don't, you'll find the first part of the book silly. If you want to learn how to scavenge food, shelter and water after a natural disaster, get a good survival book. If you're interested in history of technology and have already read everything by Henry Petroski, then perhaps you'll enjoy the last part of this book, if you overlook the apocalyptic stuff.
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