[alasdair_]

I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned and re-smelted and will be perfectly usable. The point was it was a practical guide to rebooting civilization, rather than just a list of recipes for technology.

As for the TV show premise at the beginning of the article (16 survivors that have to scavenge things in an abandoned place for a long period of time), this was done very well in a show called The Colony (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/) with fairly realistic hardships (roving bands of thugs that would mace the survivors in lieu of firearms, for example). Worth watching, even if just for the interesting tech they produce, like distilling their own ethanol to power a small engine to recharge some car batteries to power handheld tools and lighting).

[spekcular]

The top review on Amazon is devastating:

"The author purports to provide a blueprint to restoring a technological economy after a TEOTWAWKI event, but some his listed sources are from the realm of science fiction. Not an encouraging start.

He goes on to pretend that he knows more than he actually does. It's as if he skimmed a few sources but only superficially understood them. How else can he suggest that a collapsed society go direct to building blast furnaces, ignoring the bloomery method of reducing iron ore that provided mankind with workable metal for two millennia as a cottage industry? Then he goes on to suggest that we build Bessemer converters to decarbonize the pig iron. Does he not know that the Bessemer converter is all but obsolete? Did he miss the chapter about the (chemically) basic refining furnace, which is a lot easier to build?

He quotes a lot of interesting chemistry, then throws up a real laugher when he gets the simple and universally known formula for black powder exactly backwards!

While the book skims quite a potpourri of technologies we use today, he omits almost entirely the tools needed to implement them. Knowing how an electrical generator or motor is assembled is all well and good, but where will the impoverished builder get copper wire? Or the special steel sheet necessary for laminating magnet cores? Or the tooling for punching out the laminations?

He never even began to address the fundamentals of machine tools, on which about 99% of our modern technology rests, and without which you cannot build even an 18th century economy. .

As a high school science project, this would rate a solid C for effort, and something less for the end result."

[Karrot_Kream]

I read so many glowing reviews of this book on Mastodon and so I opened it up. I felt the same way as the above Amazon reviewer. The book just felt shockingly naive. His book was driven by his personal vision/ideology moreso than any actual accordance with scientific or social scientific learnings. If you're suffused deeply enough in the ideology I'm guessing Dartnell is evocative, but if you're skeptical, Dartnell doesn't do nearly enough work to convince you otherwise and often makes you giggle and lose faith with his inaccuracies (like the formula for black powder lol) and impractical takes.

[DennisP]

Sounds like we need a wiki for this stuff. If we managed to get a bunch of engineers contributing, we really would have a guide for rebooting civilization. Maybe include a button to print out the whole thing.

[jazzyjackson]

Appropedia is basically this, wiki of "Appropriate Technology", a term for tech that is well suited to the needs and resources of its users

https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia

[plonk]

You could be ambitious and fund the effort with a nonprofit. Maybe a Foundation of some kind.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Why?

Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization which somehow renders all our technology useless and unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and printers available?

I mean it's great to imagine if you want to be a pretend-prepper but the reality is that there will be millions of tons of food in the ground, tens of thousands of pounds of seeds available, oil, gasoline, kerosene, millions of cubic yards of fresh water. Lots of electrical generators, small and large, pretty much anything you need has already been built. etc, etc. You want to build a small house? Get materials from a large building!

We don't need a post-apocalyptic civilization to know how to refine cast iron, we need them to know how to repair diesel engines.

[bryanrasmussen]

>Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization which somehow renders all our technology useless and unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and printers available?

No but I can foresee a number of different collapses of civilization which render almost all computers useless within a relatively short amount of predictable time and the ability to connect those computers before they become inoperable to printers where one would print out numerous copies of the books.

[DennisP]

But also, imho, it would be a compelling way to learn how the stuff of civilization actually works.

Maybe I'm weird but it's always sorta bothered me that if I accidentally went a thousand years back in time, I wouldn't know how to restore any significant modern technology. In the same way it used to bother me that I didn't know how to make stone knives and fire without matches, the most basic technologies of human history. Learning how and doing it made me feel like a more complete human being.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

OK, maybe I misunderstood the post, but I still stand by my last statement. We don't need to recreate the Industrial Revolution, we just need to be able to repair and use the stuff that's already built.

[ethbr0]

Sounds like an opportunity for a 2nd edition!

If Amazon commenters filed pull requests rather than potshots, the world would be a better place. :)

[aqsalose]

Sounds like, if you want a capable materials, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineer to write your pull requests, you'd need to pay them a salary they request. (Them in plural, because it is unlikely to find a single individual good at everything.)

Software people like to say that software engineers is super complex and difficult. On the other hand, an enthusiast occasionally makes great FOSS contribution by filing a pull request. For some reason, that is?[1] quite rare in many other forms of engineering. If it is only because of capital cost differences of building things in physical world vs building in software world (which affects stuff like learning by experimentation), maybe we should acknowledge they are a part of reason why building things in physical world is complex and difficult.

[1] Or looks rare, I may be mistaken.

[kubanczyk]

That's the beauty of actual pull requests: that fat red X immediately saying a test case number 172 out of 42345 didn't pass, i.e. you're talking gibberish mister.

The beauty of publishing is that paper is patient and it may take literally centuries until someone draws a fat red X on point 172, that the Bessemer (or whatever) idea was always absolute and utter gibberish!

This is true both for the book, for the review you cite, for the comment you wrote, and for this comment of mine. It's nice to pretend you have a compiler-for-the-reality in your head that keeps predicting right every time, where in contrast with a true compiler you are wrong almost every single time.

[hyperhopper]

The author isn't sharing the profits, why should people do the work writing his book for him.

If he hosted it on GitHub that would be a different story.

[ethbr0]

It's called altruism.

The reviewer is under no obligation to, but if they feel strongly enough to write a detailed review, presumably they feel like a better written book would be valuable.

[WalterBright]

For a Cub Scout project, I built a DC electric motor out of nails, tape, and wire.

No special steel sheet.

[wrycoder]

How many horsepower?

[jaggs]

Yep I bought it and was very unimpressed. Very weak.

[CJefferson]

Yes, materials will be important.

We probably can't "do the same again", so much of the Industrial Revolution (from my reading at least) was started with the huge amounts of wood, then easily accessible coal, then "spending" coal to get access to deeper coal.

If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.

[ethbr0]

One thing not to discount is that if we needed to rebuild civilization suddenly... a lot of us are going to be dead.

And consequently, those surviving and rebuilding are going to have the residue of a civilization that supported many more people to work with.

Cast iron might be relatively rare, but would it be relatively rare for 1/1000th as many of us?

[notahacker]

And to a large extent, you skip the searching for raw materials to smelt cast iron to make a stove and go straight to searching collapsed buildings for cast iron stoves, or collecting railings to make a ladder etc...

[nostrademons]

Knowing how to repair and re-cast is still a useful skill, though. At some point the scavengeable items will have been scavenged and worn out, and if you want civilization to continue, you need to reboot it at a drastically lower level of complexity. That means building new production that can still be operated at the lower population levels of a post-apocalyptic world.

[ethbr0]

"Civilization" is really two things though: intangible facts & physical artifacts

If you preserve facts, you can reboot pretty quickly, relative to the initial time they took to discover.

Imagine how quickly you could make high quality steel if you could skip all the fumbling and straight to the proper carbon mix! https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/

[nostrademons]

Certainly you can probably do it faster than the 10,000 years or so it took the first time.

But it's not a panacea. A "cold start" of a complex system isn't just about replicating the system itself, it's about replicating the conditions that gave rise to it. (Witness how many ex-Googlers have founded search startups and failed to get traction, or how many people have replicated Facebook and Reddit clones and failed to get traction.) A lot of our industrial processes (like building microchips, photovoltaics, plastics, modern manufacturing) require a large base of tooling that itself requires prerequisites which may not be available. In some cases the raw materials (eg. crude oil, rare earths) are no longer accessible.

The knowledge is useful, but it'll be useful in the sense that then people can look at their current situation and bring portions of the past into it. That's probably going to involve a lot of scavenging and looting, because why dig iron ore out of the ground and fire it with coal dug out of the ground when there are large supplies of abandoned scrap steel in the world?

[lancesells]

This comment reminds me of the book "Earth Abides" and where the main character is internally debating these sorts of things. Highly recommend.

[NegativeLatency]

Casting aluminum is pretty easy and readily available

[hguant]

>If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.

I don't think this is strictly speaking true - certainly not for the US. I believe the majority of US coal production (according to wikipedia at any rate) is surface level mining, not the traditional underground mines people think about. I know that's true for parts of the Appalachian basin, I'm unclear as to whether that's true for the Wyoming mines.

Europe might be in trouble, I believe the only coal readily available on the continent is "brown" coal (lignite) which is suitable for power production, but has too many impurities to be used for steel production.

[zbrozek]

I trip over coal in folks' backyards in Kentucky. You don't need more than hand tools to get at it.

[Tade0]

There's still a significant amount of hard coal in Germany and Poland - Russian/Australian resources are (or were in the case of Russia) simply cheaper.

In any case charcoal can be used as a substitute.

[AnimalMuppet]

Wyoming coal is very much surface coal (at least in the Powder River Basin). The problem is that it's in the wrong place. It's not near iron deposits... well, there was a large iron mining operation near South Pass, but it ended decades ago. I don't know if it ended because it was played out, or just no longer economical.

[flembat]

Trade moves goods where needed. Cornish tin was used by people that had no idea Cornwall existed. It is even possible that ancient Egypt had access to cocaine and tobacco.

[ethbr0]

They do open-cut mining in Wyoming, from what I saw.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Good point. Even more, there is no way to make coal geologically ever again. All coal comes from fossilized trees that came about before fungi. They just grew until they fell over and stacked up then got buried and fossilized. Now they just rot.

Which means starting from scratch would require a different fuel like oil, but that’s even harder to extract these days, let alone in a post-apocalyptic environment.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I dunno. There are a lot of gas stations and truck stops last time I checked. Stuff stored in tanks underground tends to be usable for quite a long time.

[User23]

Pure gasoline is good for about 6 months. E10 is good for about 3 because ethanol is so hydrophilic. Fuel stabilizer can stretch that to a couple years, but gas stations generally don’t use it.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

In theory and running high performance motors at rated capability. In the real world I use years-old gasoline all the time in small engines.

[goatlover]

You wouldn't be starting from scratch as a lot of stuff already made would be left lying around, and the knowledge for fixing it and making it work would largely still exist in some form.

[groby_b]

Yeah... coal and oil won't be lying around. Which robs you of your major energy source, breaking the "fix and use" plan.

Metals are often in refined form, which means in many cases higher melting points. (E.g. pig iron is 1500K, steel is 2800K)

We're not even mentioning electronics, because the vast majority of it isn't weather resistant, which means your "left lying around" is gone pretty quickly.

Plastic is in many instances only reusable in its exact shape. Alkaline batteries last 5-10 years, so good luck with those. Solar cells, in the best case, 25-30 years.

But all of that doesn't really matter. You'll spend the bunch of your time trying to just secure water, food, and shelter. Every day you don't get started on fixing things is decay. Every day you don't spend on food is hunger. (Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor)

And so it goes.

[hutzlibu]

"Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor"

Subsistence farming without machines is back-breaking, never-ending labor.

The whole idea is therefore to get machines up and running again as fast as possible.

And it all depends on the doomsday scenario. In most cases, there should be enough machines left to scavange. Or after a while, enough animals to be hunted.

Potential biggest hurdle are social dynamics. Confrontation instead of cooperation. And then the last capable electrician in the are gets shot, because some other scavenger wanted to get his corned beef.

[groby_b]

Beginning sentence: "Coal and oil won't be lying around". The amount of machines you can run is limited, and so is the duration.

Animal hunting is mostly a settler fantasy. There's not a single place in the US that has sufficient animal population to sustain human nutrition for more than a couple hundred people. You will require careful husbanding. And, for anything larger than feeding ~100 people, you'll require feedstuff. Which you transport... Ah. There's the lack of energy sources again.

Social dynamics are the least of your problem: The confrontation fans tend to die out quickly, or secure a fiefdom within which they ensure collaboration. Human beings pretty much default to tribal behavior. And they favor collaboration even across tribes. (I recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise built in hell")

Really, it's a tougher row to hoe than you think.

[User23]

A wood fired still might be a reasonable way to turn biomass into fuel.

And while farming may seem like back-breaking labor to the Aeron chair set, it’s really not that bad. You are tied to the land, but in the scenario that’s under discussion a Disney cruise vacation isn’t in the cards anyhow. You’ll want to have draft animals though of course as tractor replacements.

[groby_b]

You need the still to start with :) But even then, you need the wood to fire them.

But yes, with draft animals you can make a go of it. It just won't leave you a lot of time to tinkertoy with the "leftover machines".

I don't think it's an unsurvivable scenario per se. I just think that the idea that you already have a starting point for an industrialized civilization is either quite naive, or takes a quite liberal view of "starting point".

[wmwmwm]

I’m a fan of that book too - though hoping I never need it!

On a tangential theme, another one I read and liked at the same time was The World Without Us - all about what would happen to the cities and infrastructure if all humans suddenly vanished overnight. Kind of depressing but there’s a lot of interesting and non obvious stuff in there

[myth_drannon]

The book has scathing reviews on Goodreads.

[ravi-delia]

I can only say that those views are not universally held. I found it to be a lovely and engaging look at the technologies underlying our industrial civilization.