- Dartnell, Lewis.
The Knowledge.
New York: Penguin Press, 2014.
ISBN 978-0-14-312704-8.
-
In one of his first lectures to freshman physics students at
Caltech, Richard Feynman posed the question that if everything
we had learned was forgotten, and you could only transmit a
single sentence to the survivors, what would it be? This book
expands upon that idea and attempts to distil the essentials of
technological civilisation which might allow rebuilding after an
apocalyptic collapse. That doesn't imply re-tracing the course
humans followed to get where we are today: for one thing, many
of the easily-exploited sources of raw material and energy have
been depleted, and for some time survivors will probably be
exploiting the ruins of the collapsed civilisation instead of
re-starting its primary industries. The author explores the
core technologies required to meet basic human needs such as
food, shelter, transportation, communication, and storing
information, and how they might best be restored. At the centre
is the fundamental meta-technology upon which all others are
based: the scientific method as a way to empirically discover
how things work and apply that knowledge to get things done.
June 2020 