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.
Professional scientist here. I would take a table of logarithms. In a world without computers, the logarithm table and slide rule are the essential tools of how things got built. We built the Golden Gate Bridge and put a man on the moon using nothing more than log tables.
Any one person can remember the gist of the scientific method and write it down on a page. To write down a quality logarithm table you would need 500 pages.
But seriously - no religions allowed.
There will always be religion, especially if and when the civilized world ends.
A better way would be just to remind everyone that there were countless religions before and that they were all man made, corrupted and fell apart after a certain amount of time.
Remind everyone that there is no one true religion because there never was one before, there isn't one now and there never will be be one.
But I'm afraid that as much as we'll try .... people will always be dumb enough to want to believe in fairy tales, an after life, eternal bliss / hell and that one group is better than another.
"Yes, all the religions before were false, but ours is the right one!"
Fuck it. Scientism's time to shine.
I think in a way religion was a necessary component in managing populations.
Without education humans will naturally look to "organised luck" or supernatural deities for meaning. That can be used as a kind of carrier wave to disseminate basic information.
"God says you should clean your cock and balls once a day in order to bring good luck"
True ... but this kind of knowledge and organization endows some people with power and control over others. Any time any individuals are given power over others for any reason, especially when that power is based on mistrust, falsehoods and outright lies ... people tend to abuse that power.
Good luck on that. For what we can tell, it is a part of our makeup. But we could aspire to less asinine systems of belief.
"Spirituality is not religion. Religion divides people; belief in something unites."
Resist the urge to fall in line behind a “strong man.” Once a community is beholden to an individual, it’s tainted.
The book should definitely recommend a system of government.
I would say directly elected council members with brief term limits, to avoid concentration of power.
No bribery in politics, with actual consequences.
Two lines:
"Axiomatically, those with the greatest material wealth will do everything to enrich themselves further. They must fail."
The scientific method, we’ll be able to extract most information of the world around with just that and time
'In the beginning the Universe was created.This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.'
I can periodically dust the book. When I'm not dusting, I can stand somewhere conspicuous, and say "This way to the book" if asked.
Can I give you holiday cover? I’d like this job, like some sort of holy librarian.
Yes of course. With all vested powers I dub thee Venicon, Librarian Most High, Director to the Book. We only have the one, but it is quite good.
Welp, looks like my LinkedIn is getting an update.
The All Mighty Guardian of the Book, Keeper of Knowledge.
You will also be required to know it by memory cover to cover and read it on request for anyone.
Then my knowledge of my own limits must. Be my contribution to the book.
Brewing beer. It might not be "essential," but the apocalypse is gonna be bad enough, might as well have beer.
Apocolpse probably needs something stronger like distilling skills.
Or how to make edibles.
Distillation alone would be useful for disinfection and conservation.
I can do those too! Hooray, I'm valuable
We value you regardless, guazzabuglio.
Appreciate it
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.
Very true. Leisure is essential even if it's not "productive." That's not a great metric to measure things by.
Beer brewing fits right in with sanitation that a lot of us are pushing.
This exercise recurs regularly and there have been a few formulations.
One of the big ones is atomic theory. It took a long time to figure out - and I’m intentionally discounting the Greek version and monads here because I’m talking about actual atomic theory and not a philosophy of essences.
Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics are a second option, especially if you could squeeze in things like the germ theory of disease.
I’m not familiar enough with pure math to say that there’s one concept that would have let the Greeks or Mesopotamians develop the calculus millennia earlier than we did, but that would also massively accelerate scientific progress.
Not sure about the Greeks or Mesopotamians, but the concept of not burning down libraries might've helped the Romans 😂
“Romans go home!”
"Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes they go the house?"
Basic logic gates for the most basic computational math As well as binary, octal, hexadecimal systems
I'm pretty sure you can make logic gates with water so maybe that'll be of some use
Omg will they have redstone? :3
[C418 starts playing]
Dont forget the basics of antibiotics.
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.
The basics of manufacturing fertiliser. It's a lot easier to build a civilisation on a full belly.
Also, funny story, I already have a disk like this started.
Ever since covid hit, I've been keeping digital copies of several books like the following:
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.
You can get full offline copies of Wikipedia too, eh? I use Kiwix for most of the stuff on mine.
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...
What're you guys doing with those rocks?
To create a firewall you must first create fire!
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.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/channel/UC7E8-0Ou69hwScPW1_fQApA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Electronic valves are still a thing?
I had relatives that swore on radios based on that technology could endure the detonation of bomb and still work flawlessly.
And I had a colleague in school that saved up to be able to buy a valve based guitar amplifier.
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.
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.
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.
You mean like the civilization starter kit, when the lights go out, the manual for civilization, or the knowledge, how to build civiliazation in the aftermath of a cataclysm?
Interesting, Thanks. I will be reading these further.
Thought I should mention that the second link is not working for me.
There's also the "How To Make Everything" YouTube channel. I wonder if the guy that runs that has written a book yet? If not, he should.
There's How to Invent Everything by Ryan North.
IIRC it's a pretty skinny book, though, so it's probably light on important details.
Interesting, I will have to check that out.
I can't help but feel soap making itself wouldn't be as much use as why/when to use it?
Mixing oil with the ashy water (which is as simple as soap's gonna get) is reasonably easy to do and so useful that even without a civilisation people would probably be doing it either through discovery or by keeping doing it?
I think things like "how to build a wooden bridge so it will hold a laden cart and not fall down" are more likely to be lost without civilisation while still being incredibly useful (although I can't say I'd be very good for that)
I might add a section on refrigeration methods like zeers or wind towers/yakhchāls if the civilisation would be somewhere hot and dry, otherwise maybe something on using rivers for powering looms, mills etc.
I think the instructions for how to make soap would be less important to a civilization than why to make soap. Germ theory and basic hygiene practices would save a lot of lives.
I feel like we’re still working on this lol. The amount of people who don’t properly wash their hands is really nasty.
Today I watched someone in an airport rinse one of their hands while holding a bag handle in the other. Then they struggled to get a paper towel for their shit covered hand as they walked out of the bathroom.
We are fucked if we slip even a little, lol. People even know about germs these days and still only go through the gesture of washing without understanding why.
I was going to add "and notion of basic hygiene" but refrained from it as it be breaking my own guideline.
Amendement: one thing, with the necessary context to make understable to role in the civilization
how to make good anesthetics. the horrors of medical interventions without anesthesia blows my mind.
maybe something about dentistry too.
Since I mentioned it in a response to another poster:
I would include everything I know (or had access to for the sake of this scenario) about germ theory. Admittedly my own off-hand knowledge is not much, but basic hygiene and sanitation and how to avoid getting sick would save a lot of lives. What germs are, how vaccination works, etc.
This needs way more upvotes
Who's ready to learn a lot about fermentation?!
Caring for animals in a humane way. Post apocolypse civilisation will be kind to our fluffy friends.
The meaning of life is very very simple, love yourself and those around you as much as possible and have as much fun as you can. If it doesn't hurt anyone or anything and you have fun doing it, do it a lot. When you genuinely love everyone around you, living becomes a lot easier and the meaning of life becomes simple.
Some of the inventions that historically took way longer than you'd expect: the shoe, the wheelbarrow, and the stirrup.
Also archival techniques so that history's not as messy the next time around.
No person can grant you rights. Rights are those things you are capable of doing for yourself providing it doesn’t infringe on the liberty of another. You are physically capable of speaking and thinking. Of moving, of tending to property, of attempting to defend yourself, your family, those who request assistance, and your property. You can build anything you have the knowledge and means to build. You have the right to determine your own safety, this includes what you ingest and any precautions you opt out of. What is not your rights are anything that limits the liberties and rights of another person or property.
"Your rights are what you can take and defend by yourself" is the logic of sociopaths and warlords, not civilization.
...print stills from primitive technology into a picture-book...
Laws of Electromagnetism
"We took all the easy to reach resources. Better get used to being primitive, suckers!"
Thus making it even more accessible, as ores have already been extracted and refine.
I would need to do a lot of adjusting for being made over a fire and do a whole lot of temperature, time, pot used, and ingredient amount/type used, but I could provide a cheesy tuna noodle casserole recipe.
Obviously this restarted civilization probably wouldn't have canned goods, an oven, a stove, a 9x13 glass pan, a clock for timing, and spray oil, so I would have to adjust the recipe to account for all of that before submitting it for that type of book.
Though, what I assume would be the hardest ingredient to come by would definitely be the cream of mushroom and cream of chicken.
Edit:
Looked up what exactly goes into cream of mushroom and it still probably would be the hardest to get due to the diversity of ingredients depending on the recipe.
'If you have no store-bought cream, hunted and foraged is fine'
There are two types of cream there I was/am not aware of...
I should have been a bit more specific because the ones I use are pretty much just canned condensed soup mix.
Cream of mushrooms and cream of chicken.
What are those?
They're soups but I have only ever seen them as condensed canned soups. They're one of those ingredients I've used plenty of times but couldn't really tell you much more about them.
So, its just chicken and mushroom soup. I was picturing specially flavoured cream (as in whisking cream).
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.
Combination of food safety and basic food recipes/methods of cooking for every biome.
Why allowing elbows on the table is the first pebble in the avalanche downfall of society. /s
Author: my mother
All these tasty nutritious facts are great, but they're doomed without a robust immune system.
They need to know how there's a drunkard's walk or one-way tropism for wealth and power to accumulate in the hands of the few, how the noblest intents get degraded and corrupted over time, how rich people get to make the rules and thereby get even richer, giving them even more control over the rules.
How this is what killed our civilisation in the first place, and how it will kill theirs if they let it. How you need to water the roots, not the leaves, unless you want the whole tree to collapse.
What rent-seeking looks like, how tribalism works, how propaganda and psyops and PR campaigns work, what narcissists and sociopaths are like, what abusive relationships look like (since they use the same tactics), how to spot demagogues, grifters and think-of-the-children paternalism. How internecine conflict is encouraged and used to distract from actual oppression. How the church maintained a vast grip on power for millennia just by manipulating shame, fear and self-righteousness.
How you can (and should!) make a bunch of rules to slow or mitigate this, but cancer finds a way; it will worm its way past your defenses in time. And when it does, you can't fix it from within the system, pretty much by definition, because it subverts the law and the entire social contract to protect and serve itself.
How the only fix is to step outside the law, step outside the system and root it out the hard way, from the top down. You can't put a formal trigger condition on this, as the failure mode will game its way round it: just say that when you need it, you'll know.
Sounds like we need to get the sociologists and cultural anthropologists on it. Can't decide whether economists should be involved. Probably not.
There is some evidence presented in David Graeber's last book that Natives of Northeast America already knew all this wisdom after learning the hard way from the collapse of the earlier empires on the Mississippi hundreds of years before white people arrived. Then when we showed up, they went oh no, not this bullshit again.
The sign of a ball with three rays shall be repulsive for thee, thou shalt not enter any shelter nor edifice with the sign of a ball with three rays, nor destroy spoken buildings.
And to react to @bool@lemm.ee I would probably be able to write some primitive method of computing the logarithms.
Does it count if I have been keeping a copy of all the Kiwix releases and could submit those documents? It would certainly be one hell of a kickstart.
Otherwise, screw civilization... Here's how you build and tune a trebuchet (yeah I have a bit of experience with the construction, as long as someone else supplies the rope).
What is and how to fight for Democracy.
Considering no one has truly figured out how to make a Democracy survive, I’m impressed this is your contribution. You should probably be writing books before this one, if you have answers.
Yo dawg, simplistic, reductive answers to complex issues is what the world needs. It's been working so well for the republican party for decades. Bonus points if you don't believe any of what you say.
Yo dawg, I actually agree with you that this is the problem. It’s why I responded to OP that it’s absurd to suggest that they have the skillset to meaningfully contribute to the topic. America’s founding fathers basically dedicated their lives to democracy. The wrote books on books on books and yet here we are.
I said this in a comment elsewhere, but democracy and human behavior are always going to be at odds. If someone could write a chapter in a book to help a new society properly understand and fight for democracy, it would be done by now.
I think OP is just arrogant to even respond that he/she is qualified to contribute such a thing. It’s some main character syndrome bullshit if I’ve ever seen it on here.
Yo dawg, the founding fathers were mostly the same rich ownership class that we see are today profiting off of political gridlocks. Our democracy is deeply imperfect thanks to the efforts of some of them, and I dont think democracy as a concept should be judged by success and failures in America. I don't think OP needs to be qualified, it's just a thought experiment.
Unironically Common Sense does attempt to explain this, and American founding fathers used this work as the template for our currently existing for of government.
Considering the fact that democracy depends on the contribution of all citizens, surely you would need to learn quite few things since your comment did not contribute anything.
Ok, I’ll bite.
Why are you qualified to contribute this chapter of a book to kickstart society? I’m totally open, maybe you are a constitutional scholar and I’m way out of line. I would like to understand why you believe that this is your chapter to write.
They probably aren’t. But they are qualified to comment on a theoretical post about the subject.
OP is asking what each person would contribute, not that each person must contribute something that they are qualified to. Which, for the most of us, is nothing. So get off your “intellectual” high horse and contribute to the conversation or change your non-contributions to silence instead of pedantic bullcrap.
I guess I misunderstood the question as being what we we’re capable of personally contributing.
If it’s just hypotheticals, I would contribute antibiotics and how to make those.
I read it as "what do you have enough knowledge of that you could aid in the birth/advancement of a new civilization?" Doesn't matter if you have it fully figured out, just what knowledge can you provide that would be highly valued if all knowledge were otherwise lost.
I’m not sure your comment contributed much either. Just comes across incredibly arrogant to me.
The follies of democracy are mostly due to human behavior. It’s a complex topic and the idea that YOU can distill it into something meaningful is laughable to me. America’s founding fathers spent most of their lives dedicated to this and look where we are now.
It’s cool, you all can downvote me for being realistic. I thought this was an exercise in actual skills one could contribute, not pipe dreams. At some point, humans have to reconcile with human behavior not being congruent with democracy, but sure, you’ll write a chapter and society will figure it out.
Come on, y’all have to be more in touch with reality than this, right?
Yet you still fail to contribute friend...let's see your proposals.
I’ve been informed that I misunderstood the question and we can offer to contribute whatever we would like regardless of our qualifications. If that’s the case, I would propose antibiotics.
Building basic flying machines.
All the physics and metallurgy things. I am also slowly acquiring skills in construction and farming.
Don't forget beer making! I understand enough about distillation to probably make liquor without killing people.
You don't need distillation to make beer though, do you?
Nope. Just fermentation.
Sorry that was unclear. I can make beer and I bet I can make liquor too.
How to make fire
Don’t. Civilization kinda fucked the planet and is the reason you live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
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.
As many works and studies about morality and ethics as possible, because god knows we threw those out the window long ago, and it's biting our asses now. I'd also add an emphasis on John Rawls' works, particularly "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical" and "A Theory of Justice".
Never trust someone who says one thing but tries to do another, or who's inconsistent on something while saying they're not.
Can't go wrong with the Old Testament, amirite guise?
I'm not sure there is anything I could contribute that someone else couldn't. Probably basic germ theory?
My contribution is a very practical tip for parents: When you need to carry a kid sitting on your shoulders, first pick them up and have them sit with both legs on your right shoulder. Then, with your right hand, grab the kid's right leg, and with your left hand grab the kid's left leg and lift it over your head to place it in your left shoulder. Mirror the maneuver if necessary. The result is a quick lift-sit-and-switch technique, and fewers kicks to the head.
How to get rid of hiccoughs. No one knows this trick! All you need to do is hold the flaps of your ears closed and drink a little water. It works every time!
imma try this and if it didnot work ill come back here.
It's never failed me since I learned about it fifteen or so years ago.
Please spell it as hiccup. The spelling hiccough gives me a headache.
Never!
This can't be true, as the real method is to plug your nose, look at the ceiling and drink out of the left side of a cup.
Another one is a small spoonful of peanut butter. 🤷♀️
A book on the ethics of care
Honestly though, it doesn't matter. We had religions based on ethical treatment of people along with a bunch of other recommendations to keep the population safe. Things like don't eat meats that were more likely to get people sick. Yet all of those books created cult like following, like any good media, a cult pops up around it. A lot of the time that cult perverses and changes the message of the media to fit what they want.
A good example of this is... Bluey, have you seen this show? A lot of people think it's an example of the perfect parents with normal kids but really it's not at all like that. The kids are unrealistic most of the time. The challenges the parents face are mundane compared to real life. It's just a media that points you in the general direction but doesn't answer any of the real challenges of parenting. You ever talk to the cultists on /r/bluey, you can tell they miss the point of the show entirely yet will completely make up their own points to each episode and set by them.
I'd explain LGBTQIA issues, personal and community acceptance of those born different.
Ancient people were much more accomodating towards those who were different.
Many so called "primitive" people reserved special roles for such individuals: xamans, oracles, etc. Their difference made them special, as if favored by whatever gods or spirits were reveared.
I read a very interesting book in my teens, essentially an anthropological/ethnological treaty, where the current obcession with difference was a creation from the 18th century.
Is shaman a gendered term? I had no idea
No. I just wrote it as I would in my native language without noticing it.
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.
Paper making and double entry accounting
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:
Is there a book called "Living off the Land for Dummies"?
I’d put the National Electrical Code out there. It doesn’t tell you how to do everything with electricity, like generating it, but it does give a lot of details of how to wire things safely.
Explain the concept of a train and tram.
A constructed language, or method of language, that balances minimalism with maximum effectiveness.
Someone, a philosopher, did that. Minimalistic, factual, objective, and a complete failure.
We don't get the language we want but what we need.
Which philosopher/language are we talking about?
A philopher from an eastern country, pre USSR. I can't recall the name; was made aware of the person in a YT rabbit hole. That tidbit stayed but the name vanished.
The imperial system of units
I do not agree.
The bible.
I want to watch the world burn again. Humanity doesn't deserve a second chance.
That's bleak.