In my childhood, fantastic literature was of particular interest to me, describing how people, society or a small group restore the knowledge of humanity. Suppose they are being thrown into another galaxy in a small area of the Earth (“Robinsons of the cosmos”, Francis Carsac), and they have to rebuild the economy, society, to resist the aggressive environment. Or the dead people suddenly wake up on the bank of a long river, young and healthy, but their old civilization does not see a trace (“The World of the River”, Philip José Farmer). In any case - you can remember on the example of “Robinson Crusoe” - to build the world around you anew is very interesting.
Not so long ago, I came across a small interview taken from the author of the book “Knowledge: how to restore our world from scratch” (you can hardly find a translation) by a representative of Wired magazine. The author, astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, devoted years of his life not only to work, but also to writing a manual for survival after the end of the world. He compiled the information necessary to restart the society, from agriculture to how to make a radio. I am pleased to share with you the translation of the interview.
How was the idea of your project born?
For some time one question persistently loomed in my mind: “What are the fundamental fundamentals behind our civilization?”. We see a lot of things from day to day, but I don’t think that many of us really understand how they work, or are created, or repaired, or what they are made of; where our food, clothes come from, how materials, metal and plastic are developed, which we use, chemical compounds that go hand in hand with us. I just wanted to sit down and answer the question asked myself: let's say the apocalypse happened, civilization is destroyed, but you survived. What you need to know? What knowledge must one possess to survive and feed oneself? What you need to know to restart a civilization from scratch? How to speed up the story a second time?
Do you think the most common forms of technology can be used differently a second time?
You know, it turns out, you can run a car that has an internal combustion engine, without using fossil fuels. You can run a car on a tree - using a process called gasification. In this big thought experiment, I think, there will be no access to oil, because we have already exhausted almost all the crude oil that can be obtained in an easy way, and the only possible way to get it today is to use the most complex drilling rigs, which probably the very bottom of the earth. You cannot do this when you return to basics with rudimentary tools. But we can make cars work. During World War II, there were about a million wood-working cars in Europe, as there was a catastrophic shortage of fuel. The German army possessed a whole division of tanks that rode on a tree, and not on diesel fuel.
What do you think is the idea of "Knowledge" is more important than others?
One of the most important things that society should never forget is something like a microbial theory. The fact that people suffer from plague is not because someone out there sends it from the sky, but because there are tiny things called bacteria that get inside your body and make you sick. With this knowledge, you can literally jump over centuries of history. In London, even the beginning of the 19th century, tens of thousands of people died from cholera, because people literally poked into the river, and after ten meters other people were washing with this water and drank it. If you explain to people the basics of microbial theory, you may miraculously save them from ulcers and plague.
More generally, to reboot civilization as quickly as possible, you need to reload the scientific method; The knowledge generation technique is used to rediscover facts about the world and fill in gaps.
How much of this civilization reset did you try to do yourself?
I tried to do enough to write about it from my own experience. I even made a photo at the end of the book from scratch, and I would like to remain faithful to this premise. You mix silver to make a primitive photo, use a single-lens camera with a single lens, and then process it.
I also made a knife from scratch, with my own hands, working in the style of blacksmiths of the 1700s. We worked on an iron smithy — we kept the metal on fire until it turned red and hot, and then we knocked the soul out of it with a hammer and an anvil. I printed a page in a book on homemade paper using elementary typography. In Knowledge, I explain how to make paper, ink, and a printing machine from scratch, so the book literally contains genetic instructions for reproducing itself.
“Knowledge” got a second life on the Web, thanks to an open forum on the project website. How did that happen?
“Knowledge” is my idea to collect the most important information for the restoration of civilization, but everyone has their own thoughts, feelings and experience in this area, so I invited people to share their ideas and discuss them with each other. Vigorous debate does not stop.
In one topic, they noted that my idea of restoring society after the apocalypse is very similar to the science fiction scenario in which you make an emergency landing on an alien, Earth-like planet without any sentient beings. Some readers even choose things and evaluate how they will differ on different planets. The thought experiment was very interesting.
You included a quote by Richard Feynman, who tried to summarize the knowledge of humanity in one sentence. Can you do something like that?
If, as a result of a global catastrophe, all the accumulated scientific knowledge would have been destroyed and only one phrase would have passed to the coming generations of living beings, then what statement made up of the smallest number of words would bring the greatest information? I believe that this is an atomic hypothesis (you can call it not a hypothesis, but a fact, but it does not change anything): all bodies consist of atoms — small bodies that are in continuous motion, attract at a short distance, but repel each other. of them tightly pressed to the other. In this phrase alone, as you can see, there is an incredible amount of information about the world, you just have to put a little imagination and a little thought to it.
“Feynman Lectures on Physics”
I quoted Feynman’s quote on the atomic hypothesis as an example of what I tried to do myself. Roughly speaking, I expanded one Feynman phrase to 300 pages and tried to cover all types of science and technology that may be useful. I was a little more lenient in terms of volumes. But instead of focusing on the atomic hypothesis, I would say that the most useful thing you can try to preserve and transmit to the survivors of this hypothetical cataclysm will be something like a scientific method. I would not try to encrypt the knowledge itself, as Feynman tried with the atomic hypothesis, but rather the technique, the method by which you make everything around you work.
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