The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Read Free Page A

accumulated knowledge? One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars. But what if these treatises on philosophy, geometry, and practical mechanisms had been preserved in a distributed network of time capsules? And similarly, with the right book available, could a post-apocalyptic Dark Ages be averted? *

ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT
    During a reboot, there’s no reason to retrace the original route to scientific and technological sophistication. Our path through history has been long and tortuous, stumbling in a largely haphazard manner, chasing red herrings and overlooking crucial developments for long periods. But with 20/20 hindsight, knowing what we know now, could we give directions straight to crucial advances, taking shortcuts like an experienced navigator? How might we chart an optimal route through the vastly interlinked network of scientific principles and enabling technologies to accelerate progress as much as possible?
    Key breakthroughs in our history are often serendipitous—theywere stumbled upon by chance. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic properties of
Penicillium
mold in 1928 was a chance occurrence. And indeed, the observation that first hinted at the deep coupling between electricity and magnetism—the twitching of compass needles left next to a wire carrying current—was fortuitous, as was the discovery of X-rays. Many of these key discoveries could just as easily have happened earlier, some of them substantially so. Once new natural phenomena have been discovered, progress is driven by systematic and methodical investigation to understand their workings and quantify their effects, but the initial uncovering can be targeted with a few choice hints to the recovering civilization on where to look and which investigations to prioritize.
    Likewise, many inventions seem obvious in retrospect, but sometimes the time of emergence of a key advance or invention doesn’t appear to have followed any particular scientific discovery or enabling technology. For the prospects of a rebooting civilization, these cases are encouraging because they mean the quick-start guide need only briefly describe a few central design features for the survivors to figure out exactly how to re-create some key technologies. Thewheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred centuries before it actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may seem like a trivial example, combining the operating principles of the wheel and the lever, but it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear in Europe until millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).
    Other innovations have such wide-ranging effects, aiding a great diversity of other developments, that you would want to beeline directly toward them to support many other elements of the post-apocalyptic recovery. The movable-type printing press is one such gateway technology that accelerated development and had incomparable social ramifications in our history. With a little guidance, mass-produced bookscould reappear early in the rebuilding of a new civilization, as we’ll see later.
    And when developing new technologies, some steps in the progression could be skipped altogether. The quick-start guide could aid a recovering society by showing how to leapfrog straight over intermediate stages from our history to more advanced, yet still achievable, systems. There are a number of encouraging cases of this kind of technologicalleapfrogging in the developing nations in Africa and Asia today. For example, many remote communities unconnected to power grids are receiving solar-power