If I were to take one book with me "down into the bunker," as Dartnell puts it, I'd hands-down take with me the Bosch Automotive Handbook[0], a phenomenally dense and thorough text covering not just cars, but their constituent parts--and their constituent parts' constituent parts--all the way down to the materials. It has wonderful tables of data on the properties of various materials (from advanced plastics and alloys to leather, paper, and common fluids) accompanied by clear and precise mechanical diagrams. It's precisely the kind of book that would secure a time-traveller's position as court wizard, all geared (ha) toward the eminently practical domain of moving across the surface of the earth.<p>0. <a href="https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/</a>
This was taken seriously in 1950s US Civil Defense. Since Europe had already been through that process recently, there was a lot of knowledge available.<p>There's a classic set of books, "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap", on this.<p>The kid's version: "A Boy and a Battery" (1942).[1] There's also "A Boy and a Motor", on how to build your own electric train set from old metal cans, some wire, a hammer and tinsnips, and the skills of a master machinist.<p>[1] <a href="https://archive.org/details/boyandbatteryrev00yate" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/boyandbatteryrev00yate</a>
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned and re-smelted and will be perfectly usable. The point was it was a practical guide to rebooting civilization, rather than just a list of recipes for technology.<p>As for the TV show premise at the beginning of the article (16 survivors that have to scavenge things in an abandoned place for a long period of time), this was done very well in a show called The Colony (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/</a>) with fairly realistic hardships (roving bands of thugs that would mace the survivors in lieu of firearms, for example). Worth watching, even if just for the interesting tech they produce, like distilling their own ethanol to power a small engine to recharge some car batteries to power handheld tools and lighting).
From the fiction side, Walter Miller's 1959 _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ [1] was written from the perspective of Benedictine Monks preserving knowledge - without truly understanding it - post apocalypse.<p>In _Earth Abides_[2] by George R. Stewart, the protagonist eventually gives up on his attempt to provide for the future, eventually deciding that the best he can do for his clan is to teach them to fend for themselves instead of foraging in the rubble.<p>That conclusion always reminded me of one of the conclusions of the WIPP report[3]: we may not be able to communicate with the future, so hopefully if nothing else, they'll learn to avoid the contaminated area through attrition....<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages#cite_note-Sandia_1992-1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...</a><p>[3, (big pdf!)]: <a href="https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/1/high_res_d/10117359.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...</a>
Simple things we take for granted are a tremendous bootstrap: the germ theory of disease; the staff system of organization; education of the young; reading and writing; arithmetic; agriculture; static analysis.<p>It's not all about gadgets and electricity.
Key element is probably less technology, and more social/political/religious unity. You need a stable and egalitarian social fabric to make consistent progress.<p>Core beliefs: rebooting civilization is hard but will make everything better (promised land), here's the scientific method and why it works, here's how to setup and maintain a democratic nation state, here's how to incentivize and reward inventors. Here's fascism and why it's bad. Here's the Prisoner's Dilemma -- everyone must cooperate with each other and identify and punish defectors. Here's songs and rituals and art you can participate in together to reinforce all of this.
Total apocalipse is not possible (Earth is so large that it's impossible nuke EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE.<p>But if this is just experiment "what if" those are thing that I would suggest to do:<p>- Forget about computers and programming and gadgets<p>- DO NOT STAY IN BUNKER, INSTEAD FIND FRIENDS!<p>- Focus on FARMING as team<p>- Scavending for potatoes, grain etc - for seeds!<p>- FARMING<p>- FARMING<p>- FARMING<p>- FARMING<p>- FARMING<p>- HARVEST<p>- FOOD = LIFE<p>What you really need is:<p>- water (well or river)<p>- water filter (from sand, rocks, and wood ash) for human consumtion.<p>- fire (easy - a lot of lighters laying around, if not use your glasses!)<p>- fuck cars and fuel - you are not going anywhere as you need to do FARMING<p>- CORN, POTATOES, WHEAT production (parts that we dont eat are perfect food for sheeps or goats!)<p>- SHEEPS, GOATS production (milk and meat!)<p>- SHELTER: there must be plenty empty houses in this scenario (everyone died!).<p>- Do forming for few years. Then you grow and grow.
You could sell food in futre and rebuild society,
maybe as agroculture baron. :)<p>OPTIONAL: [you dont need electricity as farmer!]<p>- electricy from solar panels ("borrow" them) or from wind (you can use any electrical engine for it! For example from washing machine :). This stuff is hard but doable.
I think the more interesting question than how to reinvent some technological gizmos is how to reinstate governance. It's handy to know how to build a solar panel but it isn't worth much if someone hits me on the head with a club five minutes later.<p>It's kind of funny to me that so much post apocalyptic writing is so overly concerned with technology when technology without much wisdom was what likely caused the apocalypse in the first place.
I've read his book The Knowledge years ago and it was an eye-opener. I wasn't aware how complex our agricultural and technical societies are and how much they depend on shipping and crude oil. Without oil and shipping, no chemical industry, and without chemical industry no advanced technology and no mass food production. People in supply chain management know that too well but I was simply not aware of how fragile our society is before I read his book. The premise of the book that just the right number of people die but enough remain to kickstart society is arguably a bit contrived, though.<p>Unfortunately, my overall conclusion from this book was rather negative, which is definitely not part of the book itself. It seems to me that our current technological level with a focus on consumption and constant production of new goods for short-term use, without taking into account full energy and ecological lifecycle balances, is completely unsustainable. Even with recycling and under the assumption that energy could become easier to produce (e.g. fusion) our lifestyle seems to exploit too many finite natural resources like e.g. oil. This has been known by many people since the 70s and 80s of last century and it still amazes and depresses me how slow the overall rate of change is.
If you're interested in this topic, you might also be interested to learn about <a href="http://collapseos.org/" rel="nofollow">http://collapseos.org/</a>: "It is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse."
I also recommend Ryan North's book, How to Invent Everything<p><a href="https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/</a><p>Because you'll need a little humor if you're stuck in post-apocalyptic world
I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up the global food supply post-apocalypse.<p>Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2 weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks?<p>I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources? While intended for stranded individuals, they assume you're dropped anywhere in the world with minimal gear.
Time and again, techno-utopians tend to forget that, for most of humanity's existence, knowledge was passed on orally and was not "scientific", but it allowed us to survive and flourish. It is not solar concentrators what will allow us to survive, but knowledge of the earth, soil and awareness of the place that we occupy on the web of life. And that knowledge cannot always be registered, but has to be learned from practice. You don't need a guide to know how to grow potatoes, you need to learn it and teach it to the next generations.
Unfortunately, that's not as fancy as talking about solar energy or mathematics, or fantasizing about the great library at the end of the universe.
Weird take. Sure, you could try to re-build what you had before the apocalypse. Or you could build a new world that <i>isn't</i> the one that just plunged everything into chaos. If our technology wasn't so good, the world wouldn't be as populated, we wouldn't need so many resources, there wouldn't be so many ways to poison the earth, and the earth would be habitable and sustainable for millennia.<p>After the apocalypse, I want the people who can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, tan leather, hunt, fish, manage woodlands. Doctors and scientists would be handy too, but now that we know so much about how biology works it wouldn't be so difficult to keep people living longer. Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some basic surgical skills, we're basically set.<p>The most challenging thing after an apocalypse is obviously going to be government. If there's no law and order you can't really organize anything. Whoever has the most power, best strategizing, and most flexible morals will collect the most resources and gather the largest forces. It'll be "join or die", and slavery will come back. Just read your history to see what happens when societies crumble.
There is a semi-practical use for this information: these are the absolute minimum tech trees required to spin off an independent off-planet habitat (whether in vacuum or on another planet).<p>If you're a hecto-billionaire / trillionaire however, this is also the information you'd want to be assured you can try whatever harebrained scheme you want and if it breaks the world, you externalize all that harm and "reboot" the world in your own image with this information. It would be bad if someone really buys that line; I don't think it is possible without a lot of testing on a vast scale, <i>aka</i> trying it out for real in say, space. Good thing the only working example we have of this kind of "booting" is history, and it seems to take way more than a $trillion to run the "bootstrap firmware" to a self-sustaining civilization at around say, 1940's tech tree level. I estimate around 70-100M people+children at the beginning, 30-40 years before you're out of bootstrap phase.
I wonder how we expect "new humanity" to deal with the fact that we burned all the easy coal, oil, gas deposits.<p>Also, the most important invention would be the printing press including typesets, ink and paper, as there is no way you can do everything in one generation.
To me the most likely scenario is global thermonuclear war. Surviving that and then getting back to normal means finding the stuff/people not broken, fixing the broken things, and not really starting completely over. Granted, after seeing how many people freaked the eff out over the pandemic which is absolutely trivial in comparison to nuclear war I wonder about the mental stability of anyone. Would there be anyone that could be relied on?
"bounce back faster"<p>Why is that a concern to the survivors? Perhaps they decide that "bouncing back faster" is the last thing they want?
There's always "A World Made By Hand" by Kunstler if you want a picture of what life might be like after the world runs out of oil. It's more of the "dying not with a bang, but with a whimper" variety of post-apocalyptic book. It's bad, but not horrible. Life just sort of slides back into the 18th century in a disorderly, messy and ungracious sort of way.
Why not literally stockpile the things needed to pick up mostly from where things left off?<p>Is anyone working on how one might build a scaled down version of current supply chains?<p>How small can a chip fab be, to be able to bootstrap another fab? Can you make drugs in fully automated shipping container sized labs?<p>Has anyone mapped out a full process from "Every very high tech facility destroyed" to a full technological society?
The subject had been explored many times over in books, games and magazines.
I quite like Horizon Zero Dawn's take - that post-apocalypse people should take it slow deliberately, the first reason being that too big of an advance in tech caused a given apocalypse in the first place.
Primitive technology is a pretty fascinating YouTube channel along the vein of (re)building everything from scratch. <a href="https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA</a>
I started writing "important experiments for kids" (on github somewhere) based a bit on this - just what are the base experiments (distance to moon etc) that we should all know - like what books should we all read.<p>i think things like this should be part of the curriculum
Related project & TED talk - Open Source Blueprints for Rebuilding Civilization<p><a href="https://www.opensourceecology.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensourceecology.org/</a>
You might also enjoy: Dr. Stone<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone</a>
> One of the ideas I played with in The Knowledge was what would you most want to whisper in someone’s ear — like 2,000 years ago, or if someone’s having to go through this process again — that once you’ve told someone, it kind of makes immediate sense. ...<p>This is a fascinating idea.<p>> And for me, the one that stood out by far the most significantly was this idea of germ theory and how that links to the microscope. ...<p>There's what you'd want to whisper and what the person (and their community!) would accept. History has shown people to be extremely resistant to the germ theory of disease.<p>> And actually, one of my favorite maker projects when I was researching for The Knowledge was making some Robinson Crusoe glass from scratch. ... And there’s nothing stopping the ancient Romans over 2,000 years ago building a microscope, if only they’d known what to do.<p>I'm not so sure about this. <i>A lot</i> of societal and technological developments happened between the first microscopes and the connection to germ theory. From a different article:<p>> In 1676, Dutch cloth merchant-turned-scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek further improved the microscope with the intent of looking at the cloth that he sold, but inadvertently made the groundbreaking discovery that bacteria exist. His accidental finding opened up the field of microbiology and the basis of modern medicine; nearly 200 years later, French scientist Louis Pasteur would determine that bacteria were the cause behind many illnesses (before that, many scientists believed in the miasma theory that rotten air and bad odors made us sick).<p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to-the-invention-microscope-180962725/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to...</a><p>You whisper in someone's ear "Things you can't see cause disease. The key is making and polishing glass. Now, get busy."<p>Then, within a few decades, the person is dead. Depending on a lot of factors, that person is pretty likely to have taken the knowledge, and the drive to put it into practice, to the grave. Imagine the reaction to this revelation this unfortunate soul would be greeted with. Unfortunately, we don't need to imagine, because history tells us quite clearly what happens to people who are far ahead of their time.<p>So the trick is to reveal something just far enough ahead to be useful, but not too far ahead to upset prevailing views and power structures. Not easy at all.<p>Now, imagine the world as we know it has been destroyed by something that sets us way back. How long does it take us to revert to superstition and witch hunts? The sad truth is that we're already there, even at the technological high water mark of the species. I doubt it would take more than 10 years of sustained primitive living to turn the clock back 2 or 3 milennia.
I have to be honest but when I'm thinking of post-apocalyptic scenarios and what I could do to survive, I'm thinking of my cheesemaking skills that I can use to preserve nutritious milk to keep my people fed. And I'm thinking of the farming skills that I lack and that I should really learn.<p>Civilisation starts with a few sheep or goats, a plot of land cultivated with cereals, some olive trees, maybe a vineyard on the side of a hill. If you can have bread, cheese, olive oil and wine, you have civilisation.<p>And if we can't set this stuff up, forget about rebooting technology, because we'd be all dead.
My plan, in the event of civilizational collapse is to somehow make it to New Zealand and pitch start-up ideas like the bejesus to Peter Thiel until he lets me into his luxury bunker.