What would your contribution be for a book put together to restart a a civilization?
The title is a bit over dramatic but, per the title, if you could contribute with one piece of knowledge to a book that every single individual should learn from in order to kickstart a civilization, what would be yours?
My personal choice would be the process of soap making, from scratch.
Brewing began as a way of preserving fruits and grains, and of guaranteeing the safety of drinking water. It’s absolutely going to be essential if we get blasted back by about a thousand years.
I was thinking of it purely as a means to unwind, but you’re right. I kind of forgot about the documentary How Beer Saved the World, even if it is a bit exaggerated at times.
Even that angle is more than just frivolity. Sitting around a fire, having some drinks and some laughs isn’t just a nice time, it’s vital to humans both as individuals and as a community. We’re social critters. We thrive when we care for others and are cared for by others, and the bonding that develops out of those drinking sessions is a way to establish that.
I wonder if a book along these lines already exists. The nearest I can think of is The Art of Manliness website.
I would probably buy a book that covered a lot of the basic skills needed for a society if it were done well. I want to try a lot of those things like smelting, house construction, metalworking, etc. I'm sure books exist for each of these but I doubt one book tries to give overviews of all.
Also an interesting question: What ARE the skills needed for a civilization? Start from skills needed when dropped off alone in the wilderness and work your way up to "needing" bureuacrats.
It’s hard to choose “one piece” of knowledge, so I would try to persuade whoever is writing the book to include the time traveler’s cheat sheet. https://i.imgur.com/O6vSrvq.jpg
I didn’t make it, but includes a lot of information that didn’t have an intuitive path to discovery, but a lot of practical benefits for humanity. If I were to add to it I would try to include at least descriptions of a few other things:
batteries
engines
simple computers (although this may be more involved than the earlier parts combined, so perhaps just simple logic gate diagrams)
genes
a guttenberg press
lenscrafting
a world map
calculus
special and general relativity (also complicated certainly, but could be useful later)
and basically as many physics equations as I can think of
I would write an overview of extended mind theory, an introduction to human cumulative culture, knowledge engineering and TRIZ.
The history of human civilization is riddled with challenging problems, solving which takes more than multiple human lifespans worth of effort. Having a good learning resource about the most advanced methods and tools for navigating these problems would be a huge help, I think.
Fire safety, fire prevention, fire fighting. Y’all got the rest covered already. These things were and still are learned the hard way. No reason for us to repeat the experiments with more lives.
Ever since covid hit, I’ve been keeping digital copies of several books like the following:
Reader’s Digest DIY Manual
The Forager’s Harvest - A Guide to Identifying Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants by Samuel Thayer
The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants
Back to Basics - Abigail R. Gehring And of course a copy of Wikipedia.
I haven’t gone full “prepper”, but seeing how fast things went sideways at the beginning of covid, it makes me feel a little better to set aside a little bit of hard drive space, just in case.
I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Yeah the guitar amp and vintage HiFi markets keep a few types (mostly power triodes and pentodes but also preamp valves and even a couple of rectifiers) in production, largely in the former Eastern Bloc. There’s a few people on YouTube making their own too.
They didn’t stop working somehow. The trick is that they need a very high (deadly) bias voltage to work, are mechanically delicate, have to be heated and possibly cleared of gasses leaking in, and from what I can tell have inferior characteristics for a lot of applications.
On the other hand, your relatives are right about the electrical toughness, and they have no firm upper frequency limit, so they still have industrial niches.
You actually can make simple semiconductors artisanally, once again plugging Sam Zeloof. The biggest trick is getting the silicon in the first place, since you need an electric furnace to smelt it with any efficiency. Then, it’s just a matter of distilling it to high purity and growing a crystal.
The pump is the biggest trick for vacuum tubes. If you have a primitive metalworking civilisation to start with, you probably have enough mercury for a Sprengel pump and/or a master craftsman who could make a mechanical pump, but if we’re starting really from scratch that could be an issue. Steam to displace air + a chemical getter is another option I’ve been wondering about.
Also worth mentioning are electrochemical diodes, which you can make with just brine, iron and a piece of aluminum. Aluminum is tricky to make but if you can produce it it’s also pretty good for wires, in case you don’t have a copper mine handy.
Algebra and concepts of calculus, and why they’re useful
How to preserve foods
Basic concepts of electricity’s importance and how to make it, but someone would need to explain how to go from raw material to a functional wire, find some rare earth magnets, and figure out how to make LEDs or something else worth using the electricity for.
The scientific method
Concepts of how to engineer/design a solution to a problem
Troubleshooting techniques
Some basic concepts of boat stability and construction
Some concepts of modern psychology
Concepts of critical thinking and rejection of groupthink
Basic physics. Loose explanations of kinematic equations, gravity, friction, pendulums, air resistance, aerodynamics, basic concepts of rocketry and flight/parachutes/gliders
Evaporative cooling? I could describe the concepts of modern air conditioning, but that doesn’t seem useful yet.
I could probably work out how a windmill works, how to make a wagon, how to purify water, how to make water-tight storage.
Germ Theory
The Paradox of Tolerance
How pasteurization works
Fermentation, concepts of distillation
Basic oral hygiene? Habits of at least rinsing sugar out of your mouth afterwards, if brushes aren’t available.
Use of alcohol and heat as antiseptics. Suggestion to use honey in a pinch
Basic concepts of how magnifying lenses work and why they’re important
Yeah, that would be crucial too. Antibioitics and the risks of antibiotic resistance need to be included. But to create and purify effective antibiotics, you also need to start with the scientific method, then branch into chemistry, biology, etc. Glassware and procedures to minimize contamination would be important to effectively extract helpful ingredients from potentially harmful molds/other sources.
Depending on the starting scenario, it might be possible to skip much of that at first if we had leftover supplies from a prior civilization. If this site is to be believed, it sounds like making penicillin at home is quite a process, but doable if you’re able to get the right supplies. I don’t see any efficient pathway from here to there if we had to start from zero though.
Basic system and web security might not seem important now, but let me tell you, if you adopt good cyber security practices early it will help you create a much more secure environment…
Some basic concepts of medication - clean wounds (preferably with alcohol, because it kills germs), understand how germs spread, and know the basic ideas behind vaccines. If society had known these things 1000 years ago, it would’ve saved billions of lives.
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