The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch (29 page)

So is there a different way around the problem? Obviously, if any reliable clocks or digital watches have survived in the aftermath, all you would need to do is set one to the local time when you head off, pop it in your pocket during your odyssey, and take it out to compare against local time (which you’d still need to determine by sextant
observation) to get a fix on your current longitude. But what if there are no relic timepieces?

The problem in the early eighteenth century was that although you could work out your local time, you had no way of remotely telling the current time back in Greenwich. Harrison’s eventual solution was to take a copy of Greenwich time with you, but it would equally work if Greenwich could somehow regularly communicate its time to ships around the world. One harebrained proposal was to set up a network of signal ships anchored in mid-ocean to relay the sound of cannon blasts indicating the moment of noon in London. But we now know of a far more practical means for signaling over vast distances: radio.

A post-apocalyptic civilization rebooting along a different pathway through the web of scientific discoveries and technologies may arrive at another solution to global navigation. They might find that building rudimentary radio sets (see Chapter 10) is an easier prospect than the fabulously intricate workings and compensatory mechanisms of a sufficiently accurate timepiece. (But then, this will obviously depend on the rate of reattainment of different technologies—how do you compare the complexity of minute mechanical cogs and springs to that of electronic components?) Regular timing signals can be broadcast from whichever prime meridian is selected as the baseline for longitude, and relayed to far-flung regions by ground stations or other ships. In this way, the sight you could see in the early stages of recovery might be wooden-hulled sailing ships coursing across the world’s oceans, looking very much as they did in the Age of Sail, but with a subtle difference: a metal wire strung up the main mast as a signaling aerial.

The bright urban illumination and light pollution of modern industrialized civilization has robbed many of us of our formerly intimate relationship with the facial features of the heavens. But in the aftermath you’ll need to become reacquainted with the configuration of the sky in order to reclaim your connection with the rhythm of the
seasons. This isn’t irrelevant, arcane astronomical detail: it will enable you to plan the agricultural cycle to avoid starving to death, and it will prevent you from getting lost in the wilderness.

THE GREATEST INVENTION

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. E
LIOT,
Four Quartets
(1943)

THROUGH THE PAGES
of this book we’ve covered many topics that are utterly critical to any civilization, such as sustainable agriculture and construction materials, as well as some advanced technologies that will be required once a recovering post-apocalyptic society has progressed to a more developed stage generations after the Fall. We’ve explored shortcuts through the web of knowledge, what gateway technologies to aim for, and how to leapfrog over intermediate stages to superior, yet still achievable, solutions.

But despite all the vital knowledge presented in this reboot manual for civilization, there’s no certainty that a post-apocalyptic society will attain an advanced technological state. Many great societies have flourished thoughout history, their wealth of knowledge and technological prowess a glittering gem in the world at the time, but most stall at some point and reach a stasis, an equilibrium state with no further progression, or they collapse altogether. In fact, the sustained progress of our current civilization is something of a historical anomaly. Medieval European society progressed through the Renaissance, the
agricultural and scientific revolutions, the Enlightenment, and finally the Industrial Revolution to create the mechanized, electrified, globally interconnected society we live in today.
But there is nothing inevitable about a sustained trajectory of scientific development or technological innovation, and even vibrant societies can lose the impetus to advance further.

China provides a particularly interesting case in point. For many centuries the Chinese civilization was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world. China had invented the modern horse collar, the wheelbarrow, paper, block printing, the navigational compass, and gunpowder—all world-changing inventions that we’ve covered throughout this book. Chinese textile production made yarn using multiple spinning frames with a centralized power source, and operated mechanical cotton gins and sophisticated looms. The Chinese mined coal, discovered how to convert it into coke, utilized large vertical waterwheels and trip-hammers, and beat Europe by one and a half millennia to using blast furnaces to produce cast iron, then refining it into wrought iron. By the end of the fourteenth century, China had achieved a technological capability not seen anywhere in Europe until the 1700s, and seemed poised to initiate an industrial revolution of its own.

But, astonishingly, as Europe begun to emerge from its long Dark Ages with the Renaissance, Chinese progress faltered and then ground to a halt. China’s economy continued to grow, mostly due to internal trade, and the expanding population enjoyed consistent living standards. But no further significant technological advancement occurred, and, indeed, some innovations were subsequently lost again. Three and a half centuries later, Europe had caught up, and Britain plunged into the Industrial Revolution.

So what was it about eighteenth-century Britain, and not fourteenth-century China or indeed another nation in Europe at the time, that fostered this transformative process—why
there
and why
then
?

The Industrial Revolution encompassed increases in the efficiency of textiles production—the mechanization of spinning and weaving, transplanting these traditionally small-scale, home-based activities into large, centralized cotton mills—as well as advances in iron making and steam power. And once industrialization got underway, the process fed itself, and the transformation accelerated: coal-fired steam engines pumping out mines allowed more coal to be extracted, which fueled blast furnaces to produce more iron and steel, which in turn were used to build more steam engines and other machinery. But the conditions that made all this possible in the first place were quite specific. While a certain proficiency in engineering and metallurgy was of course required to construct machinery for alleviating the toil of humankind, the key trigger for the Industrial Revolution wasn’t knowledge. It was a particular socioeconomic environment.

There has to be some benefit to building a complex and therefore expensive piece of machinery or a factory to accomplish what is already being achieved by people using traditional methods. And eighteenth-century Britain presented a peculiar confluence of factors that provided the necessary impetus and opportunity for industrialization. At that time Britain possessed not only abundant energy (coal), but an economy with expensive labor (high wages) coupled with cheap capital (the ability to borrow money to undertake large projects). Such circumstances encouraged the substitution of capital and energy for labor—replacing workers with mechanization such as automated spinners and looms. The economic situation in Britain had the potential to generate enormous profits for the first industrialists, and it was this that provided the incentive to put up large amounts of capital to invest in machinery. On the other hand, China at the end of the fourteenth century, despite coal mining, coke-fired blast furnaces, and mechanized textiles manufacture, did not have conducive economic conditions in place to drive an industrial revolution. Labor was cheap, and would-be
industrialists could expect little benefit from innovations that improved efficiency.

So while scientific knowledge and technological capability are necessary prerequisites for the advance of civilization, they are not always sufficient. If a post-apocalyptic society is knocked back to a rudimentary pastoral existence, there is no guarantee it will eventually undergo an Industrial Revolution 2.0, even with all the crucial knowledge provided in this book. In the end, social and economic factors determine whether scientific investigation flourishes or innovations are adopted. Throughout this book there has been the underlying assumption that the survivors in a post-apocalyptic civilization would want to progress along our developmental trajectory to an industrialized life. While I don’t want to get into a debate over whether technology necessarily makes people happier, it is a robust point, I think, that a community struggling for subsistence, with an uncomfortable and punishingly hard lifestyle and access to only basic healthcare, would certainly appreciate the application of scientific principles to improve their standard of living. But at what point does a technologically progressing civilization reach a peak beyond which further advance brings diminishing returns? Perhaps a recovering civilization will reach equilibrium at a certain technological level, neither advancing further nor regressing, once it has achieved a stable economy, comfortable population size, and the ability to draw sustainably on natural resources.

This book is of course not a complete compendium of all the information you would need to rebuild your world from scratch. A great deal of material has necessarily been left out. We’ve mostly focused on inorganic chemistry, useful for making agricultural fertilizers or industrial
reagents, rather than the synthesis or transformations of organic molecules. Organic chemistry has become increasingly important over the past century: processing the fractions of crude oil, purifying and modifying natural pharmaceutical compounds into more potent versions, synthesizing pesticides and herbicides for more reliable food production, and creating a whole new domain of materials with properties unlike anything we find in nature: plastics.

We’ve talked about biology to the extent of how you can nurture certain animal or plant species, or control microorganisms, in order to feed yourself and remain healthy. But we’ve not looked at the details of how life actually works on a molecular level—why it is, for example, that we need to breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, whereas plants drive the opposite chemical process using the energy of sunlight.

We’ve skipped a lot of materials science and engineering principles and only brushed over the building blocks of all stuff: the structure of the atom and the four fundamental forces of nature. Not all atoms are stable, and radioactivity offers the possibility of an appallingly destructive weapon, as well as a source of peaceful power, but also allows you to determine the age of our planet, offering a glimpse down the dizzying hole of deep time. In Earth sciences we’ve missed out on the theory of plate tectonics, for example: the mind-blowing concept that the vast continents are scudding across the surface of the planet like leaves on a windy pond, occasionally crunching into one another to crumple up entire mountain ranges. These profound realizations that the world has not always been as it is now, and is bewilderingly old, are required to understand the theory of evolution by small changes from one generation to the next. All of these represent kernels of knowledge that a recovering society would need to reexplore and unpack for themselves by investigation, as well as by filling in the gaps between the other hints provided in this book, before eventually reconstituting the
cornucopia of knowledge we collectively hold between all of us alive today.
*

So how do you find things out for yourself? What are the tools you need to relearn the world? Let’s continue with our back-to-basics approach from the previous chapter and look at the most effective strategy for producing new knowledge yourself: science.

The basis behind all scientific investigation is the appreciation that the universe is essentially mechanical, its components interacting with one another in orderly ways following universal governing laws and not the whims of temperamental gods. These underlying rules can be revealed by reasoned thought based on firsthand experience and observation. First and foremost, science is empirical, and everything must, in principle, be checked and verified independently, rather than basing it on logic alone or merely accepting the proclamations of past or present authorities (or, indeed, this book you’re holding in your hands). So if you want to manipulate the world around you for your own benefit, to create artifacts or pieces of technology that exploit particular effects, you must first develop a sound comprehension of the natural laws that the world abides by. This understanding can come only from observing the world and spotting patterns in its behavior. But just as important, you need to have the capacity to notice discrepancies in the expected pattern: anomalies that betray new natural phenomena—the compass needle twitching next to a wire or the halo around a mold patch cleared of bacteria, for example. This requires the ability to measure things
accurately, to be able to place numbers or values on different aspects of nature to compare them and monitor how they change over time.

The absolute root of science, then, is the careful design and construction of instruments for making measurements, as well as units to count these in. For example, a straight stick marked with regular notches is the simplest kind of instrument: a ruler for measuring length. But in order to communicate to someone the size of an object you’ve measured as 6 notches long, they also need to know the unit you are using—the exact spacing between the notches. Hence the key to recovering science from scratch lies in the creation of a set of measuring units. A post-cataclysmic society will need a system of measures in any case. The basic functions of civilization include the marking of distances for construction or travel, the measuring of fluids in a jug or weighing of solid produce for trade, the administration or taxation of areas of agricultural land, and the timing of different civic activities during the day. We experience these fundamental properties—length, volume, weight, and time—directly with our senses, and they are easily quantified. Other properties, such as heat or the tingle of electric current, we also encounter with our senses, but we need cleverly designed instruments to be able to measure them.