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

infrastructure, hopping over centuries of the Western progression dependent on fossil fuels. Villagers living in mud huts in many rural parts of Africa are leapfrogging straight to mobile phone communications, bypassing intermediate technologies such as semaphore towers, telegraphs, or land-line telephones.
    But perhaps the most impressive feat of leapfrogging in history was achieved by Japan in the nineteenth century. During the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan isolated itself for two centuries from the rest of the world, forbidding its citizens to leave or foreigners to enter, and permitting only minimal trade with a select few nations. Contact was reestablished in the most persuasive manner in 1853 when the US Navy arrived in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo) with powerfully weaponized steam-powered warships, far superior to anything possessed by the technologically stagnant Japanese civilization. The shock of realization of this technological disparity triggered the Meiji Restoration. Japan’s previously isolated, technologically backward feudal society was transformed by a series of political, economic, and legal reforms, and foreign experts in science, engineering, and education instructed the nation how to build telegraph and railroad networks, textile mills and factories. Japan industrialized in a matter of decades, and by the time of the Second World War was able to take on the might of the US Navy that had forced this process in the first place.
    Could a preserved cache of appropriate knowledge allow a post-apocalyptic society to similarly achieve a rapid developmental trajectory?
    Unfortunately, there are limits to how far ahead you can push a civilization by skipping intermediate stages. Even if the post-apocalyptic scientists fully understand the basis underlying an application and have produced a design that would work in principle, it may still be impossible to build a working prototype. I call this the Da Vinci effect. The great Renaissance inventor generated endless designs for mechanisms and contraptions, such as his fantastic flying machines, but few of them were ever realized. The problem was largely that Da Vinci was too far ahead of his time. Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the necessary properties and available power sources.
    So the trick for a quick-start guide must be to provide appropriate technology for the post-apocalyptic world, in the same way that aid agencies today supply suitable intermediate technologies to communities in the developing world. These are solutions that offer a significant improvement on the status quo—an advance from the existing, rudimentary technology—but which are still able to be repaired and maintained by local workmen with the practical skills, tools, and materials available. Thus the aim for an accelerated reboot of civilization is to jump directly to a level that saves centuries of incremental development, but that can still be achieved with rudimentary materials and techniques—the
sweet-spot
intermediate technology.
    It is these features of our own history—serendipitous discoveries, inventions that were not waiting for any prerequisite knowledge, gateway technologies that stimulated progress in many areas, and opportunities to leapfrog over intermediate stages—that give us optimism that a well-designed quick-start manual for civilization could givedirections toward the most fertile investigations and the crucial principles behind key technologies, guiding an optimal route through the web of science and technology, and so greatly accelerate rebuilding. Imagine science when you’re not fumbling around in the dark, but your ancestors have equipped you with a flashlight and a rough map of the landscape.
    If a rebooting civilization is not required to follow our own idiosyncratic path of progress, it will experience a completely different sequence of