THE KNOWLEDGE: A DIY Guide on How to Rebuild our World After an Apocalypse by Lewis Dartnell

The world has suffered from some form of apocalypse and most of humanity is gone. What skills and knowledge would the survivors need in order to recreate a modern civilisation again without regressing back to the Dark Ages? How would they find this knowledge, and where would they start?  

Practical handbooks for surviving and rebuilding after an apocalypse are not new, and there are survivalist groups around the world who spend their lives and their incomes building fortresses and strongholds for just such an eventuality. Moreover, popular media likes to present us with myriad and imaginative ways that our civilisations may collapse; from pandemics to zombies, alien invasions to environmental collapse, asteroid strikes to nuclear holocaust.  However, most narratives focus on surviving the disaster and its immediate aftermath of the breakdown of law and order, without much consideration about what happens next.

The Knowledge aims to fill that (hopefully hypothetical!) gap. It functions as a primer for understanding what technologies underpin modern society, how to access them and why they are important. Its aim is to halt a quick return to primitive existence (once the current resources that have survived the apocalypse are gone) and jump-start the evolution of science and technology that we take so much for granted, in order to return to a reasonable level of civilisation as quickly as possible. More than that, it describes the steps that are needed for this process, from the basics of providing food, shelter, clothing and medicine, to the longer-term practical issues around growing food, making new tools and materials, and returning to a global society through travel and communication.

It’s an ambitious goal for one 300-page book, and to achieve its goal certain assumptions have to made: the apocalypse has been one which has affected mainly the human population (such as a global pandemic) but has not affected the larger environment; the apocalypse has left intact at least part of the current infrastructure, in order to supply a ‘golden age’ where the vastly reduced population is able to survive fairly well for a limited amount of time on the gleanings from the deceased civilisation around it; the apocalypse has left a good proportion of Mankind’s gathered knowledge intact and accessible in some form or other.

Once the groundwork is out of the way and the parameters have been set, the book really goes to work. Each chapter explores a fundamental necessity – some not at all obvious - for regaining to our modern lifestyle. The author examines the requirements for the immediate and short-term (such as food, clothing, shelter and medicine), the medium-term (such as agriculture and the generation of power) and the longer-term (such as long-distance communication, travel, and the creation and manipulation of infrastructure materials such as chemicals, glass, metals and plastics).  It describes what skills are needed, what tools and infrastructure need to be rebuilt, in what order and why. It does not aim to act as a practical handbook; instead it explains the basic principles that these things will require – from sowing crops to weaving, from making steel to harnessing steam for power, suggests the tools and expertise that will be needed to make them and describes why they are important.

And that’s the genius of this book, and the reason why someone living (thankfully) in a world which has not experienced apocalyptic conditions might be interested to read a book with such a doom-laden premise. Living in a socially stable environment, surrounded by modern technology and systems designed to make our lives more comfortable, it is very easy to forget how we have created all things that surround us; the myriad tools we use, the food we eat, the clothing we wear and the buildings we live in, as well as the infrastructure that allows us to communicate with people on the other side of the world or to travel to see them. And that doesn’t even consider the materials that our civilisation is built on; plastics, glass, metals, chemicals, that we use without any understanding of how they have been manufactured. The fundamentals that are behind how our computers and mobile phones work, what our clothing is made of, where our food comes from, how our cars propel themselves, the lights we turn on when it gets dark and the pills we swallow when we feel ill – all of these come from mountains of incremental research, from massive amounts of human ingenuity, mistakes, testing and trial and error. And yet we see only the end results rather than understand the processes and the effort that went into their creation.

The Knowledge, therefore, is not only a primer for getting back to our current level of civilisation after a global disaster, its about recognising how far we have come already. It’s an introduction to understanding how we have created the world that we live in through the basic scientific principles that underpin all facets of our modern civilisation. And, ultimately, this book is a paean to the scientific process; to rigorous research, continuing trial and error and to constantly questioning and testing the world around us in our unending search for knowledge and understanding.  

A footnote: I came across The Knowledge as a result of an interesting discussion recently with a group of curious people who came with me to the Alps at the end of July (see HAT’s Off to The Alps on the Event page for what we got up to). The discussion centred around what skills we collectively were able to contribute to our survival, were an apocalypse to happen and we ended up stranded in the middle of the Alps with no outside assistance. [This conversation led to Thoughts from the Alps 01: What are Your Skills?; some ideas around the perceived importance of practical skills versus social and personnel skills in our modern society.] Most interestingly, following this discussion one of the participants mentioned this book, that she had recently read and which she assumed I had also already come across (given the topic of our discussion), which started from the same apocalyptic premise and questioned how much we knew of the world around us. It seems our little group in the Alps is not the only one to recognise the importance of expanding our knowledge base!