I will be doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session this Friday, 2nd May, starting at 4pm UK time (11am Eastern; 10am Central; 9am Mountain; 8am Pacific) and running through that day. Here’s the direct link to my AMA post. You can ask me absolutely anything about The Knowledge and rebuilding civilisation from scratch, and I would love to hear your thoughts on what you would consider to be the crucial information to preserve!
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
Guest post by architectural designer Sam Davey (@SNDavey; website). All illustrations © Sam Davey.
Shelter. It’s one of the most fundamental of needs but immediately after the Fall permanent habitation it is likely to be the last thing on your mind. You may be one of those displaced by the crisis of civilisation, or reacting to more violent parts of the population, scavenging for food or simply looking for a source of uncontaminated water. In any case, in the immediate aftermath it is very likely that most nights not spent under the stars will be spent under a roof built before the collapse.
These buildings, though, will not last forever and the time will come when a post-apocalyptic community is going to need to know how to construct permanent shelter for itself. Here’s how to build a house.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
Chapter 10 of the book focusses on communications technologies, leading up to how you could reinvent radio transmitters and receivers. This would of course require a certain degree of capability in handling electricity, and in particular in the construction of electronic devices. We look at the feats of ingenuity involved in the construction of POW or Foxhole radios with rudimentary means during the Second World War (see, for example, these references). This Make magazine article showcases an incredible range of electronic components that people have built from scratch at home – everything from capacitors and diodes to headphones and even homemade cathode ray tubes (as used in old televisions).
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
So this graph (on the left) has been echoing around Twitter and Facebook for a little while now. While I won’t delve into the religious debate that this plot has been invoked in, there are certainly a number of problems with the historical portrayal that are important to mention.
To start off, it’s in no way clear exactly what metric is being plotted on the y-axis – how would you go about rating the degree of ‘advancement’ of any civilisation as a single number? And indeed, what reason is there to think that throughout the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations there was a consistent and steady march of ‘progress’, and not varying rates over time with periods of relative flourishing or stagnation. The scientific developments made by Islamic culture during the middle ages in Europe, such as advances in mathematics and medicine, are ignored completely. As is the thriving Chinese civilisation that produced, for example, the compass, gunpowder and the blast furnace. The influx of both Chinese and Islamic learning back into medieval Europe was critical to the subsequent progress that eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. And it’s not the case that European culture completely languished during the ‘dark ages’ – there were important social shifts as well as vital developments in agriculture and the application of power, such as in the development of the windmill.
But all those caveats being said, I do still think that this graph holds at its core a notion that is interesting and worth thinking about. The general sense is clear: that after the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe was in a period of comparative stasis (certainly in relation to the rate of change with the Renaissance and Enlightenment). The question, then, is if our modern industrial civilisation were similarly to collapse, what steps might you be able to take to support a rapid recovery – to shrink the post-apocalyptic hole as much as possible..?
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
The thought experiment behind The Knowledge was to try to write a book that contains enough practical know-how and investigative pointers to accelerate the rebooting of civilisation and recovery of scientific knowledge after a global catastrophe. Of course, no single book – or indeed a whole, straining bookcase of tomes – could possibly contain the vast expanse of human knowledge today. But earnest attempts have been made in history to compile a record of all that was then known.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
The notion of preserving human knowledge for posterity, in sum total or at least a condensed summary of the key principles, in case of a cataclysm that collapses civilisation is not a new one. As discussed more fully in the History of the Total Book blogpost, eighteenth-century encyclopaedia compilers were conscious of the fragility of past empires and made efforts to catalogue and preserve crucial information for society in the aftermath of a great catastrophe. One of the inspirations for me to begin researching and writing The Knowledge on this theme was James Lovelock’s 1998 essay on the threats to our modern civilisation and the necessity for a ‘Book for All Seasons’. And there have been a number of other, similar propositions since then.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
A fitting epitaph for our own civilisation..?
The epigraph from the post-apocalyptic novel The End Games by T. Michael Martin (via @JuliaBell)
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
One of the central themes of Chapter 1 of The Knowledge is exactly what sort of world post-apocalyptic survivors are likely to find themselves in, and how that will change over time. Nature will readily move in to reclaim our cleared farmland and urban spaces. But there are already many places today where the modern world has receded as people were forced out, perhaps by war, and these offer glimpses of what the future may hold. George Monbiot has written this fascinating feature article in Aeon magazine, Accidental rewilding.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.