Book of the Week: The Knowledge

01 Jun 2014

When All Hell Breaks Lose covers surviving the initial days after a catastrophic emergency, but I want more than to just survive. I want to be able to rebuild a civilization. Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch goes through the thought experiment of the necessary steps and leaps that one would need to make to rebuild. What shortcuts can we take and what is the bare minimum it takes to get something going again? Chemistry I like the chemistry sections, where he explains how you can extract certain compounds and how you can combine those compounds to do useful things. Like using wood ash and fat to make soap or making ammonia by fermenting pots of piss. Or how to make gunpowder. I wonder why I wasn’t taught chemistry in this fashion. Historical The historical information was also interesting. Like how René Laennec invented the stethoscope, because he was uneasy about pressing his ear and check agains the chest of a buxom woman. Or how wars were fought over islands for their guano. Shit was valuable, because it was hard to get nitrogen in usable form before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. It is hard to imagine having such a large population without that process. You probably won’t be able to rebuild the world after reading this book, but serves as a guide post to reflect on how we got to where we are as a civilization and the things we take for granted.