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A review by otherwyrld
The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World After an Apocalypse by Lewis Dartnell
3.0
I had the pleasure of hearing the author of this book speak recently at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. His speech was basically an abridged version of this book, which was already on my to read list but this propelled me to seek it out.
It starts off really well, describing in excellent detail what would happen if our civilisation were to collapse (the details of why are wisely left out of this book), and what would happen in the immediate aftermath of such a disaster.
Where the book falters though is in the longer term descriptions of what people would need to do to recreate civilisation. There are chapters on agriculture, food and clothing, substances, materials, medicine, power, transport, communication, advanced chemistry, and time and place. All of these may well be vital information but paradoxically much of the information in this much is both too detailed and not detailed enough. The end result is a book that I increasingly first skip read, then didn't read whole sections because it either assumed too much went into too much detail. Ironically, the best way to relearn some of the science and technology would be to watch the video clips on the Knowledge website, something that would be lost to us if civilisation really did collapse.
In the end, the book itself is less a reboot manual than a list of things you would need to research in order for them to be reinvented. In other words, you need a whole lot of genuine "how to" books (hopefully you still have a large physical library somewhere close by which might provide this information) .
I did enjoy this book, at least in part, because it does try to sum up much of what we would need to bring our civilisation back up to today's level. Whether we would want to is an entirely different matter.
It starts off really well, describing in excellent detail what would happen if our civilisation were to collapse (the details of why are wisely left out of this book), and what would happen in the immediate aftermath of such a disaster.
Where the book falters though is in the longer term descriptions of what people would need to do to recreate civilisation. There are chapters on agriculture, food and clothing, substances, materials, medicine, power, transport, communication, advanced chemistry, and time and place. All of these may well be vital information but paradoxically much of the information in this much is both too detailed and not detailed enough. The end result is a book that I increasingly first skip read, then didn't read whole sections because it either assumed too much went into too much detail. Ironically, the best way to relearn some of the science and technology would be to watch the video clips on the Knowledge website, something that would be lost to us if civilisation really did collapse.
In the end, the book itself is less a reboot manual than a list of things you would need to research in order for them to be reinvented. In other words, you need a whole lot of genuine "how to" books (hopefully you still have a large physical library somewhere close by which might provide this information) .
I did enjoy this book, at least in part, because it does try to sum up much of what we would need to bring our civilisation back up to today's level. Whether we would want to is an entirely different matter.