
What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civilization? - Petiver
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-books-could-be-used-to-rebuild-civilization-lists-by-brian-eno-stewart-brand-kevin-kelly-other-forward-thinking-minds.html
======
jwatte
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...

~~~
rjsw
I would put De re metallica [1] on the list.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica)

~~~
xyzzy123
Then the whole Gingery series:
[http://gingerybookstore.com/](http://gingerybookstore.com/) (from furnace to
machine shop!). Although his designs are based on scrap aluminium, you can
also use cast iron.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
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.

~~~
jjoonathan
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.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
No.

We deforested entire continents getting our industrial revolution going. There
aren't enough left to do it a second time. And if what I read is correct, it
will take between 750,000 and 2 million years for reforestation to occur
naturally.

> but there's definitely enough to get a pocket of civilization back on its
> feet.

What's "back on its feet"? You've watched too many movies.

The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron
works. No electricity, no internal combustion engines.

If civilization stumbles, it dies.

~~~
jjoonathan
No.

> There aren't enough left to do it a second time.

Why do you think it would take an amount of resources comparable to the first
time? We know what we're doing now so there will be much less fumbling around
AND we would have an abundance of high-grade feedstock left over from the pre-
fall civilization.

> What's "back on its feet"?

"Back on its feet" = a level of sophistication in resource extraction capable
of facilitating resource use beyond recycling, i.e. the ability to avoid the
exact scenario you described.

To make things more concrete, let's call it the level of sophistication
required to build and fuel primitive fission reactors. I think that even you
will agree that by that point fears of energy scarcity would be bunk.

> You've watched too many movies.

If you can't imagine "shortcuts" to take on the path to re-industrialization I
would hazard a bet that you don't have training in the relevant industrial
chemistry. Here's a fizz-buzz level self assessment to check if you're going
all Dunning-Kruger: name one or more plausible post-apocalyptic alternatives
that would be used in place of the WSGR and Haber processes.

> The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron
> works.

Why do you think that salvaged metal could not suffice for bootstrap purposes?

Hell, you don't even need to make your own mining / refining / manufacturing
equipment, you just need to patch up the stuff that got broken in the
commotion.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
> We know what we're doing now

Yeh. We. Now.

Post-collapse? No, _they_ won't. If everything was intact (including
unwritten, institutional knowledge), then there won't have been a collapse in
the first place.

------
spc476
Procedures in Experimental Physics -
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917914562](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.

~~~
sitkack
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John-
Moore/dp/0521878586) the second edition can be had for a song.

------
DanAndersen
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/](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.

~~~
hammerdr
The Knowledge is the book that every library and "End of the World" kit should
have in it.

~~~
secfirstmd
Agree. An excellent book.

------
noir-york
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.

~~~
selimthegrim
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...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-carta)

~~~
noir-york
For the same reason that the Origin of Species and Darwin are credited with
discovering evolution even though Origin doesn't get evolution really right.
Or Greek democracy - not a true democracy in the modern sense - suffrage was
limited for free men.

The key point of the Magna Carta is that it codified the principle of the rule
of law, even if it was a limited to aristocrats. The side-effect is that it
implied that a different source of value - human reason in the shape of laws -
was legitimate, and not the absolute rule of the king.

~~~
dTal
In what way did On the Origin of Species not "get it right"? It necessarily
has holes as Darwin was unaware of DNA or horizontal gene transfer, but he
nailed the basic mechanism, and anticipated and addressed many of the
criticisms that would be leveled.

~~~
noir-york
Right, Darwin nailed the principle of evolution but Origin is now primarily a
(very important) historical document, not the field book of modern
evolutionary biologists, for some of the reasons that you give, DNA,
punctuated equilibrium, etc.

Likewise with Magna Carta - its an important historical document which laid
down the principle.

------
garethsprice
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).

------
qznc
This lists seems focused on culture, not on survival or technology.

Instead:
[http://rebuildingcivilization.com/](http://rebuildingcivilization.com/)

~~~
agumonkey
If I were to redesign school, this would be the spirit.

------
Yizahi
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.

~~~
thomasahle
At the time of rebuilding civilization, knowing about minerals in rocks
probably wouldn't be useful. Even today you have to mine very deep. Nearly all
of the worlds resources are now to be found at surface levels.

~~~
user_0001
This. If "civilisation" (as we know it) had to be rebuilt, it would not be
possible. All the easily extractable resources have been used. The equipment
needed to get out the remaining would not be possible starting from stone age
technology.

Any rebuilt civilisation would not be technological. The "best" we could
"hope" for would be agrarian based, with 0% unemployment, people living in
cohesive communities, with active fulfilling lives....

wait a minute.........

~~~
noir_lord
If civilisation ended all the materials we mined would be on the surface
except the things we burnt.

Gigatonnes of metals even the completely rusted out remains would be far
easier to refine.

Not to mention all the other stuff.

Hardest problem would be energy as we have consumed easily available fossil
fuels but that's not intractable, we in the west of built our way of life on
profligate fossil fuel consumption, there are other ways.

------
stochastician
The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Especially if we still had mammoths.
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-
Macaulay/dp/1405...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-
Macaulay/dp/1405302380)

------
mc32
>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.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
> PS. Wikipedia, is probably a good start.

It's just an offhand remark by you, but I think it's a very good idea.
Wikipedia is quite hit-or-miss, but right now it's at least the equal of any
traditional encyclopedia we had in the old days.

But if there's no power and no technology, how do you view your offline copy?
At least books have the potential of surviving for hundreds of years w/o too
much degradation.

~~~
lucaspiller
I've always thought a Kindle and a solar phone charger would be a good
doomsday survival device. Obviously it isn't quite as durable as a book, but a
lot easier to fit in a rucksack and can contain a lot more content.

------
evincarofautumn
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.

~~~
WalterBright
You'd probably want to study farming, animal husbandry, woodcraft, etc.,
instead. I.e. you're going to need to learn how to grow food really fast!

~~~
tracker1
I'm actually far more interested in learning how to create firearms and
ammo... As sad as it sounds, that's probably a more pragmatic plan.

------
ja27
Back to Basics - [http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-
Skill...](http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-
Skills/dp/0895770865/)

A Reverence for Wood -
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486433943/](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.

------
oldbuzzard
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-
Production/dp/1581125666)

[2] [http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/](http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/)

------
teekert
As a biologist I'd put "Molecular Biology of the Cell" on the list
([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/](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.

------
faizshah
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.

~~~
sandworm
>US Army Survival

I got one for christmas. Whatever that books says, sharks CANNOT be scared
away by splashing.

The version I got was probably a little dated.

------
sandworm
"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.

~~~
jqm
I'd make sure to leave those books out (religious texts as well)...

Other civilizations have got by just fine without them, and maybe without
tainting influences, the survivors will do better next time.

~~~
sandworm
Take a look at Blacks. Legal dictionaries are not moral works. The language of
a legal system does not dictate how that system is used. It doesn't define
what is legal or not, or set punishments. All it does is provide a framework,
a common starting point for building upon.

~~~
indrax
There is a lot of implicit baggage there still, for example in saying that
punishments are a thing courts can do, and that they are a response to crimes.

The paints 'civilized law' as authoritarian, vengance based, and using
primitive means to try to alter behavior.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Your logic is off. Punishments are a response to crimes as part of the
definition of "crime".

------
walterbell
If we're starting over: Vol. 1 of Charles Singer's _History of Technology_ ,
[http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient-
Empi...](http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient-
Empires/dp/019858105X) covers the period up to 500 BC.

------
frankydp
[http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumb...](http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumber=7398)

Probably one of the better collections.

------
jpfr
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...](http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783642228490-t1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1381128-p174536437)

\- 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

------
eveningcoffee
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.

~~~
avz
I disagree. Many advanced books on any subject would end up being huge volumes
with 90% of the pages serving as introduction to the core idea discussed by
the book.

Not every book about programming needs to begin with detailed description and
examples of what the conditional statement or for loop is. You can arrange
books in series with prerequisites and this is how people learn new subjects.

Your idea seems comparable to demanding that all C/C++ programs expand all
their includes inline or that all Java programs that need a HashMap implement
one rather than importing java.util.HashMap.

Perhaps a better solution is for books to suggest prerequisites to read or at
least enumerate their assumptions about reader's prior knowledge. Some books
actually do that.

------
abecedarius
It's not at the level of animal husbandry or first aid, but I'd hate to think
of the Feynman Lectures being lost.

------
on_and_off
The Village Construction set sounds like something that would be useful :
[http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/) . Of
course, you would have to fork it in order to adapt its plans to a
technological reboot.

------
TravisJamison
Antifragile - To help keep civilization from needing to rebuild itself a 3rd
time. [http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-
Incer...](http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-
Incerto/dp/0812979680)

~~~
iwwr
What were the first two times?

~~~
ajcarpy2005
He's saying it hypothetically:present time of 1 time, after proposed
catastrophe and civilization collapse, this is second time. Antifragile is
intended to prevent breakdown of the second build up. So that a third rebuild
is not necessary.

------
jschwartzi
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.

------
inklesspen
"The Knowledge", by Lewis Dartnell, is a book which purports to tell you how
to re-bootstrap civilization.

[http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/)

------
Thiz
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.

~~~
rasur
I'm inclined to suggest electromagenetism, but I'm essentially agreeing with
you :)

------
UhUhUhUh
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.

------
lifeisstillgood
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.

------
te_chris
No Das Kapital?

~~~
blumkvist
Yes, if this happens, please get this book and also another which describe all
the atrocities that it lead to, so nobody in the new civilization ever tries
to pull this shit off.

------
skidoo
The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.

------
cbd1984
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.

~~~
bsder
I'm okay with most of this as they are solely products of a specific time.
Most of these will disappear with time, anyway, even if civilization doesn't
collapse. How many people have the ability to read Shakespeare let alone the
Magna Carta? And, even if you gave someone the Magna Carta or the US
Constitution, their value is in more how we _don 't_ obey the letter of those
documents.

What needs to be preserved are the fundamentals. The world has order and obeys
rules even if you don't understand them right now. The world is made up of
very small things that give the world it's order. Noise that comes out of your
mouth can be copied to rock/clay/papyrus and given to other people over long
distances. The nature of a hypothesis and a test is vitally important for
moving forward instead of in circles.

~~~
blumkvist
Socrates, Aristotle and Plato's work has been relevant for 2000 years and I
don't see it becoming irrelevant any time soon. Same with Descarte, Kant and
many, many more.

Mankind's greatest goal and challenge is building a society. Building space
rockets might help that, but they might not. One might argue that ancient
Greece and Rome had better societies or at least equal to what we have today.

~~~
plinkplonk
"One might argue that ancient Greece and Rome had better societies or at least
equal to what we have today"

In both Greece and Rome, slavery was legal and women had next to no rights.

Any society in the West today, with all its imperfections, is _way_ better
than anything in ancient Greece or Rome

~~~
blumkvist
Yeah, I guess if your slaves are a million miles away and you don't see them,
it will make you sleep better. Even pretend they don't exist.

~~~
icebraining
[http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html](http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html)

------
ommunist
Gosh, the "ABC" should be the No. 1 in this list.

------
guard-of-terra
Why not use wikipedia?

------
sparkzilla
50 Shades of Grey

