
What Is the One Fact Humanity Needs to Know? - dankohn1
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/how-come-no-one-mentioned-evolution-by-natural-selection
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jerf
Related to a couple of answers, but I'd still sharpen it to: "Humans naturally
seek reasons why they are right, but to understand the universe, you must seek
reasons why you are wrong."

From that one insight, the entire rest of the scientific method flows; from
there, science itself, and math, and pretty much the ~10 answers that didn't
include this idea in it.

~~~
ggchappell
> Humans naturally seek reasons why they are right, but to understand the
> universe, you must seek reasons why you are wrong.

Fantastic! Is that original?

~~~
jerf
It _very_ obviously is the result of many other ideas, and I won't deny that.
However, I have not seen this particular focus sharpened down to this brevity
anywhere else.

It came from a slightly different source for me, but a similar one. Imagine
you're thrust back in time 200-400 years, and let's just stick you in England
or something where you've got a University and a willing audience to learn.
How do you transfer as much knowledge as possible, as quickly as possible?
Well, as much as I think the Prime Directive of Star Trek is a bit of a crock
as a _moral_ principle [1], as a descriptive principle we can see there's some
truth to it today, if we look around with open eyes... simply transferring
_knowledge_ without transferring the ability to develop it yourself, or, if
you prefer, transferring wisdom, is a dangerous thing to do, and tends not to
produce lasting results. So I asked myself what my thesis would be, what's
something short and simple that I would repeatedly hammer on? And that's what
I came up with.

I would also do that thing that some of the best teachers do, where they tell
you "I'm going to deliberately screw up derivations in class, it's on you to
catch them", to try to avoid being treated as personally reliable myself. (The
"Dark Ages" are widely misunderstood and were not the barren wasteland of
knowledge advancement the popular conception has of it, but I do think you
could make a good case that they were indeed slowed down by over-privileging
Aristotle and the other such classical authors for too long.)

[1]: Specifically, it leaves a rich space of options between "completely
leaving the society in poverty to their own devices" and "just blunder in and
start selling tech with wild abandon" completely unexplored. It's a _great_
dramatic device, I really have no problem with it within the show itself, but
it doesn't travel out of that context well.

------
Houshalter
This is relevant:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/)

>Imagine that Archimedes invented a temporal telephone ("chronophone" for
short) which lets him talk to you, here in the 21st century...

> If you say something that is considered obvious in your home culture, it
> comes out of the chronophone as something that is considered obvious in
> Archimedes's culture...

>if you say "The Earth circles the Sun" it comes out of the chronophone as
"The Sun circles the Earth". It doesn't matter that our civilization is right
and their civilization is wrong - the chronophone takes no notice of facts,
only beliefs and cognitive strategies. You tried to transmit your own belief
about heavenly mechanics, so it comes out as Archimedes's belief about
heavenly mechanics.

------
rayalez
‘Spin a magnet inside a loop of copper and the form of energy you create can
provide you with light, heat, food and clean water.’ is my favorite. And the
ones about scientific method of course(but I think there should be a way to
put it more eloquently and concisely).

~~~
ChuckMcM
I liked that one too, but could just leave them a statue with only the legs
remaining and a poem :-) _Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!_ indeed.

~~~
DougMerritt
I love that poem. :)

------
aruggirello
So the best scientists in the world were asked “If civilisation was destroyed,
what scientific information would you pass on to the survivors?” - And all
they could come up with was basically, choose the most precious bits of
information that would hopefully allow the survivors to restore our great
civilisation (and possibly repeat our mistakes)?

IMHO “If civilisation was destroyed,” given current environmental status
(exhausting resources, pollution, rising sea levels and temperatures, almost
75% of species gone extinct in the last century), as well as our unsustainable
economy, corrupted political leaders, and proliferated nuclear weapons (still)
powerful enough to fully obliterate mankind (if not the whole of life on
Earth), it would most likely be due to ourselves.

So the best bits of information I would pass on to survivors would be those
that would allow them not to repeat our mistakes: "take care of the
environment, and don't make war to each other; do this with the utmost
diligence - keep in mind it's a really tough job; so tough in fact, that we
failed, and all of our advanced technology, with all of our wisdom, wasn't
enough to prevent our collapse."

Edit: I understand my answer is perhaps OT (in the sense that it's not
scientific information) but nevertheless if we want to maximise the survivors'
chances...to survive, I would rather ensure they do not make our mistakes;
because if we assume they'd have their own history and evolution (as a
civilisation), just like we did, then we might assume as well, that they would
make mostly similar discoveries, so there's no point in telling them in
advance what they are going (sooner or later) to find out by themselves
anyway.

~~~
tw04
I think you missed the most important one. Each couple should have no more
than X children.

Half the reason we have what we have today is fighting over finite natural
resources. You eliminate the pressure of overpopulation, you eliminate a
massive reason to fight in the first place.

~~~
schoen
I read someone's demographic observation that children are an asset in rural
areas and a liability in urban areas. It's not clear that you could easily
convince small-scale rural farmers in an area that wasn't affected by human
population pressures that having lots of kids was a bad idea for the future.
(At best, they might say "OK, when there are so many people that they're
crammed together in cities, maybe it will be possible for the people of the
future to want to have smaller families".)

------
Someone
_" Illness is often caused by tiny lifeforms, invisible to the naked eye"_

I think this is the most important thing to learn, because it would spare the
future from a lot of suffering and give future people leisure time to think
about the world and discover things for themselves. However, I don't like that
this is a bit of knowledge that doesn't easily allow humans to verify it.

Instead, I would tell them that one can see many tiny things some of which
make us ill, but not the tiniest of them, by staring through a tiny water
droplet.

Item #2 would, I think, be a statement on the periodic table that can easily
be verified using minimal technology, again with a hint that there are even
smaller things.

------
joesmo
"Gods, spirits, ghosts, and all the other stuff you think exists do not
exist."

~~~
mmphosis
_Not only does God play dice but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot
be seen._

~~~
joesmo
WTF does that mean?

~~~
Shorel
It's a quote by a physicist about quantum mechanics defending the Copenhagen
(many universes) interpretation.

Because Einstein said: 'God does not play dice', he wanted to express that
just because there's a probability of measuring something doesn't mean reality
itself is built upon probabilities.

------
api
My first thought was electricity -- spinning magnets generating fields that
power things.

My second was the Haber process, a simple reaction that produces fixed
nitrogen. With that a simple agricultural society could escape subsistence.

------
JauntTrooper
"All these worlds are yours except Europa - attempt no landing there."

~~~
charlieflowers
Nice. And ... go dig around those old pyramids....

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drzaiusapelord
I'm going to say basic germ theory. Suddenly, you can safely go about in the
world as opposed to constantly getting sick via the simple act of washing up.
Didn't washing up before delivering babies greatly lower infant mortality?
Boiling water/treating sewage make everyone healthier? Not to mention, the
benefits of washing out wounds to avoid infection.

As a free bonus, this stuff automatically gives you an idea of microbes which
should lead to lenses, microscope, telescopes, and, ideally, another
scientific enlightenment.

~~~
schoen
I read somewhere that immune responses (and pathogen virulence and
reproduction rates) can be erratic enough that you can easy do small
experiments that seem to disprove particular routes of contagion of particular
diseases. Experiments with proper sample sizes and controls will probably
work, but I wonder if some societies would reject the germ theory as disproven
by experience or even experiment.

It's also hard to get proper experimental controls, especially without modern
technology and sanitation. And the process of empirically proving the
relationship between specific pathogens and diseases is complicated!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch's_postulates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch's_postulates)

So I guess my concern is that people could have a lot of seemingly compelling
experiences that might make them reject the germ theory (or think it was only
applicable to a minority of infectious diseases), even after having been told
about it in detail.

------
pasbesoin
TANSTAAFL

P.S. Ok, I see now that the context is science and reconstructing
civilization.

Perhaps the acronym is a bit less pertinent, then. Perhaps not. Even in
scientific and technical fields, I see too much attitude and salesmanship that
disregards it, to the detriment of those who blindly buy in to the pitch.

TANSTAAFL -- even if you're very bright.

~~~
tpeo
There ain't no such a thing as talking people out of a free lunch. Or I don't
think so, at least. Even the best of us fall for it.

------
Ygor
I'm surprised no one mentioned the source of cataclysm itself. The fact that
there was a civilization and despite all its advanced knowledge - it is now
gone.

This would be especially important if Cataclysm was man-made.

~~~
glhaynes
Unless the cataclysm was a side effect of the consumption of the easily-
accessible fossil fuels. If humanity had to restart its technological
progression today with most easily-accessible fossil fuels already used up, it
might find it much more difficult to progress past about where we were in the
nineteenth century. [http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-
civilisat...](http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-
without-fossil-fuels/)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Or they'd just move directly to electrics. Some early cars were electric. The
range and power wasn't impressive, but it worked. Wind power becomes pretty
obvious at that point as well. Tie a fan to a generator, and voila, free-ish
energy.

With no oil, people will just deal with the limitations of low wattage
electrics until they get better battery and generation tech. Arguably, you
could have a 19th century type society with a nuclear reactor; both uranium
and graphite can be mined with simple tools.

------
Numberwang
Generally the answers are rather weak. Dr Samuel Godfrey I think did the best
job.

Also, I wonder what a very religious scientist would answer.

~~~
cryoshon
You will be very hard pressed to find religious scientists that are reputable.

~~~
smoser
This list from Wikipedia claims otherwise.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_Nobel_laurea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_Nobel_laureates_by_religion)

~~~
schoen
Be careful using those lists to show that people on them are "religious"; the
articles' notes themselves quote laureate Orhan Pamuk (on the list of Muslim
laureates) as saying "I do not believe in a personal connection to God" and
James Gleick as saying that laureate Richard Feynman (on the list of Jewish
laureates) was "distinctly uninterested in either the faith or sociology of
Judaism".

You can also follow random Wikipedia article links and find, for example,
laureate Joseph Rotblat saying "I am not a particularly religious person, and
this is the reason for my agnosticism".

------
Shorel
I have made two Foundations.

The other one is at the other side of the world...

(assuming civilization is not destroyed at once but in slow phases)

------
maxharris
To obtain the knowledge you need to survive and thrive, there is no
alternative to reason and the five senses.

------
vixen99
Content aside, this is presentation suited for a pre-teen.

------
kordless
All this is a dream.

\- Michael Faraday

------
tezza
We never have all the answers.

------
erostrate
My first thought was the same as number 3, the scientific method. But looking
at history, many important discoveries were made long before the scientific
method was formalised. It seems some weak, intuitive form of the scientific
method came naturally to many people throughout history.

So I would rather go with something that took a very long time to be
understood and was absolutely necessary to create any civilization. For
example number 4, basic hygiene. Or agriculture: "you can grow edible plants
on purpose by planting their seeds in the ground and watering them". The
scientific method is not very useful if you have to spend your life hunting
and gathering to survive.

