Normally I don’t care to think about things like the end of the world. There’s enough to worry about in life: Where did I file that important tax document? Why am I getting so many age spots? Who invented the chia pet, and why? According to everything on television, zombies will either be our demise, or our next stage of evolution, or de-evolution — we won’t be extinct, just unattractively “undead” — so my plan is to enjoy being alive, until I’m not.
The thing is, something could happen to make life on Earth extremely difficult, and if there are survivors after whatever apocalyptic event befalls us, those survivors will need to regroup and rebuild. The big question is this: If a civilization’s infrastructure is destroyed — no electricity, no running water, no functioning cities, no means of communication — how will we start from scratch?
Lewis Dartnell, the author of this week’s book “The Knowledge,” has spent quite a bit of time thinking about this very issue. What information and skills would surviving humans need in order to reconstruct an interconnected, thriving society? Unlike other survival manuals, which tend to focus on the most immediate challenges of surviving a global catastrophe, “The Knowledge” sets out to “(teach) how to orchestrate the rebuilding of a technologically advanced civilization.” It’s not that a reader won’t learn basic survival skills from Dartnell’s book; straightforward, tactical advice for basic survival requirements — shelter, water, food — is included. But this intriguing guidebook takes the survival quest many steps further by answering these two questions: “Once the survivors have come to terms with their predicament — the collapse of the entire infrastructure that previously supported their lives — what can they do to rise from the ashes to ensure they thrive in the long term? What crucial knowledge would they need to recover as rapidly as possible?”
Probably the biggest challenge a surviving population would face is the reality that “human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population.” As the author points out, “Even if a skilled technician from a steel foundry survived, he would only know the details of his job, not the subsets of knowledge possessed by other workers at the foundry that are vital for keeping it running.”
