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Depressing lack of books on animal husbandry, crop management, basic mechanics and machining, and math/physics/chemistry text books and field manuals.
Philosophy is good and important, but much easier to carry verbally (out re-invent) than the thousands of years of trial and error of "what's this red stuff in the dirt and what can I do with it?"
Then again, assuming that we'll lose civilization but terrain the ability to read written English is somewhat hard to justify, too...
Yeah, I'm not denying we need the philosophy/history books
But civilization would need to bootstrap to "current levels" quickly, and I assume a lot of knowledge about that is currently only in people's heads
Crops + Animal Raising -> food. Then construction and metallurgy (helps with the first items), then thermal machines, then industry building all over again. Then to electronics, semiconductors up to computers again. Don't forget all the medicine, chemistry, plastics, oil processing there as well
I would put De re metallica [1] on the list.
I agree. Medicine, metal working, practical mechanics are severely underrepresented. Not to mention alternative energy sources.
civil engineering books would be my bet and basic medicine like first aid
None. The books are printed on cheap paper that will rot.
Furthermore, our civilization is unrebuildable.
In the mid-1800s, oil was so shallow that it bubbled out of the ground. It was possible to pump it with mid-1800s technology. Call that "level A".
Soon though, that oil was gone, people wanted more. It took "level B" technology to drill for that... but we were at level B by then, thanks to the level A oil.
Today, we drill for oil through 3 miles of water, and a mile of rock below that. That's "level Z" oil.
If they need oil to get from level A to level B technology, but all the oil requires level Z to drill for it, then you don't get to rebuild civilization. It's not just oil, this is true for every resource we use.
If our civilization stumbles, it dies.
I met a guy here in Spain that mines with X gram /ton of a given metal and makes money.
In America, with 10 times more grams/ton they don't exploit it, because "it is so expensive, not worth it".
In America over half of the mineral(you can analyze the terrain in the laboratory and compare what is has with what you extract with industrial processes) goes away with the drain because it is in a different physical shape that what the industrial machines are designed for. They just couldn't care less.
This is what prosperity could make to you. Like bears eating the livers of salmons and leaving the rest. We used to open a coal or oil well and BURN(without using it) THE NATURAL GAS first. A 1 meter of diameter burning pipe could burn for years!! In fact, in lots of places in America, where there is no gas pipeline they continue burning the gas, because it is so cheap, not worth it.
Old American cars use to be machines for wasting oil. This is what happens in Venezuela today, when with the money it takes to fill the tank you could fill 1500 tanks in Venezuela. People have problems eating in Venezuela, but they could use the biggest 4x4, or speedboat you could dream of.
This is an entirely valid point.
The 'natural resources' that enable /easy/ development of civilization aren't anywhere near as common, if they even exist.
What's necessary is a more adaptive approach and possibly some caches of resources that would be necessary to bootstrap once again; also a form of storage which won't degrade in just a few hundred years.
Trees. You forgot trees. There isn't enough high-energy carbon there to sustain an industrial revolution, but there's definitely enough to get a pocket of civilization back on its feet.
One thing left out of this analysis of oil availability is all the places where the incentive structure has not resulted in the exploitation of easier to access oil. E.g. places where land owners have no mineral rights and oil exploration and exploitation by the government is a major negative, and the government isn't strong enough to get around lots of these land owners. I think Argentina is one of the classic examples of such a nation.
There's also coal -> oil, if you've got some hydrogen handy.
As for "every resource we use", you've got to separate the ones we "use up" like fuel, and ones that are still available after use, like most metals. E.g. access to iron/steel and copper will be trivial, just mine ruined cities, land fills, etc. etc.
I can't say with 100% confidence this would work out, but I know the sort of people our betters despise will roll up their sleeves and give it a try.
Procedures in Experimental Physics - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917914562
While it sounds high tech, it covers the basics of manufacturing lab equipment, from iron casting, to making your own glassware, lenses, photographic plates, Geiger counters and so on.
Thank you! I have been looking for this book, I thumbed through a copy in a lab I visited.
Another excellent book in the same vein is, "Building Scientific Apparatus" - http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John-Moo... the second edition can be had for a song.
Related to this subject, I'm currently enjoying the audiobook of "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch." ( http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ ) I like its emphasis on potential alternate paths of doing a rapid reboot of civilization, where a rebuilt society would not need to go along the same lines that our did to get to this point.
The Knowledge is the book that every library and "End of the World" kit should have in it.
The Magna Carta.
Civilisation is not a working air-con and LTE. Saudi Arabia has those, and it is not a 'civilisation'.
Civilisation is primarily a political order built on liberal tolerance of multiple sources of value, and the rule of law. Roman civilisation, at least up till Constantine 1, was a civilisation.
Why not the Constitution rather than Magna Carta (no article is properly necessary)?
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-ca...
You don't get to substitute your own definitions for the shared ones. Civilization has a common meaning and your definition isn't it.
The Foxfire books were a school project in 1960s rural Georgia to capture the dying knowledge of homesteaders - cabin building, soap rendering, animal husbandry, etc.
They were used by the 1970s commune movement as instruction manuals for self-sufficiency/"back to the land" living so they have a track record of usability.
They're a great history lesson, and contain the building blocks that any civilization needs to solve (shelter, heat, food) before it can worry about higher order things (philosophy, politics, smartphone reception).
This lists seems focused on culture, not on survival or technology.
Instead: http://rebuildingcivilization.com/
I thought about this for some time and I think that in worst case we need only two books, that probably doesn't exist today.
One book must describe how to create metal, iron and steel - what kind of rock formations can contain iron ore and other ores, how to manufacture it starting from zero, without any instruments, how to create steel using iron instruments etc.
Second book must describe electricity - what is it and how to create it in maximum possible ways. Chemical, mechanical etc.
Books should be either etched on rust resistant metal plates or maybe on some plastic polymer sheets, pages bound together with a variation of spring binding.
Also wherever possible any single page should be self-contained and if used separately from the book contain at least some useful information.
Everything else probably can be lost.
The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Especially if we still had mammoths. http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-Macaulay/dp/1405...
>Where we once delighted in imagining the turns civilization would take hundreds and even thousands of years ahead..."
So dramatic. For most of humanity people have worried about tomorrow's food. For the most part fanciful imagination was nurtured by the enlightenment and the scientific method, but before that, I think, we just thought about food and how to better defeat threats --enemies, wild animals, nature.
PS. Wikipedia, is probably a good start.
The question of “what would we do if everything went to hell?” is what makes me motivated to study things like chemistry, physics, electricity, and machinery—topics I would ordinarily have no need for as a software developer.
Like, hmm, if you can’t refine oil anymore, how would you set up large-scale ethanol production so that you can run engines? How would you modify the engines to run on 100% ethanol? Where do you find ore and how do you smelt it? If you want to make gunpowder, where in the world do you get saltpeter and sulfur? How do you make gunpowder, or even just charcoal, without blowing yourself up? Can you make hormonal birth control, or even condoms? How about antibiotics? I’ve had some very good wikiwalks starting from questions like these.
Back to Basics - http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-Skill...
A Reverence for Wood - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486433943/
and maybe something by Ray Mears, but I don't think any of his books really capture what his TV shows do - aboriginal cultures and their skills that are about to vanish.
Kevin Dunn's "Caveman Chemistry"[1] is a fun book.
Instructions for tinkerers "for making bronze from metal ores; glass from sand, ashes, and limestone; paper from grass or straw; soap from fat; alcohol from honey; photographs from egg whites; chlorine from salt water and celluloid from cotton."[2] among other things.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Pr...
As a biologist I'd put "Molecular Biology of the Cell" on the list (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/). This book was basically my M.Sc. exam in molecular biology. It is very rich in helpful illustrations. I'd think even someone with enough interest but no background in biology can extract a lot of information from it.
I would throw The Human Past, Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers, and US Army Survival guide into the mix. I also think there should be more of a focus on construction/architecture and agriculture/horticulture. A book containing some facts about earth science and especially on the unique geographic features of each region of the world would be necessary. I would also add a book on common plants and their uses and a book on human health/nutrition.
I think people are focusing too much on the luxuries of complex civilization. If you're at the point where you have to rebuild civilization it would be more necessary to focus on building a good foundation i.e focusing on improving your food, water, shelter, medicine, and social systems. I think the book Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers would be a good enough foundation to get started on physics, mechanics, and math.
"Civilization" implies something more than basic survival.
No doubt this will be downvoted, but I would go with some basic legal texts. The law has been part of civilization from the beginning (Hammurabi). Something like Blacks Law Dictionary would be vitally important in setting up a reliable system post-zombie.
If we're starting over: Vol. 1 of Charles Singer's History of Technology, http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient-Empi... covers the period up to 500 BC.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumb...
Probably one of the better collections.
In Germany, there is an engineering bible that contains /everything/ on over 1500 pages and is regularly updated since 150 years.
That book alone would give any civilization a running start into the 21st century.
Here's the table of contents: http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddoc...
- Advanced Mathematics and Statistics
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Materials and Materials Processing
- Mechanics
- Thermodynamics
- Electronics
- Measurement Theory
- Control Theory
- Informatics
- Design and Development in Engineering
- Manufacturing
- Management
- Standardisation
- Law
- Patents
I think that we should instead have books that should be self contained and possible to read without any prior knowledge. For example a book about mathematics should start from very basic concepts illustrated such way that any motivated human could finally understand it without no prior knowledge about any math.
The same for other fields and also for a language.
It's not at the level of animal husbandry or first aid, but I'd hate to think of the Feynman Lectures being lost.
The Village Construction set sounds like something that would be useful : http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ .
Of course, you would have to fork it in order to adapt its plans to a technological reboot.
Antifragile - To help keep civilization from needing to rebuild itself a 3rd time.
http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. It's basically a manual of useful constants, plus tables of equations, plus other information.
The data is replicated online in various places but if the networks are destroyed it could be useful to have the constants.
"The Knowledge", by Lewis Dartnell, is a book which purports to tell you how to re-bootstrap civilization.
A book that explains how to go from a water wheel to a hydroelectric dam that will provide energy for the next industrial revolution.
I believe electricity is the greatest discovery of all.
Perhaps it would be more productive and realistic to focus on books that could help prevent our demise? Our current position is not a loop that one can comment out.
Came to suggest "The Knowledge - how to rebuild society from scratch". It's an excellent trot through the whys and wherefores of how we got here.
No Das Kapital?
The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.
The books which won't eventually be recreated are things like religious texts, philosophical works, legal books (laws, constitutions, court cases), and fiction (including poetry). Therefore, unless we preserve those, they and everything they contain will be lost forever, even if we do eventually make it back to multi-core CPUs and string theory.
Gosh, the "ABC" should be the No. 1 in this list.
Why not use wikipedia?
50 Shades of Grey