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What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civilization?

118 points by Petiver 12y ago

DanAndersen 12y ago
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 12y ago
  The Knowledge is the book that every library and "End of the World" kit should have in it.
  - secfirstmd 12y ago
    Agree. An excellent book.
mc32 12y ago
>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 12y ago
  > 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.
  - mc32 12y ago
    Easy, print it. They allow it to be downloaded and printed, from what I understand --only drawback is that fast moving topics become fossilized, but all printed books are that way.
  - lucaspiller 12y ago
    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.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Indeed https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/568368792906153985 https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/568368792906153985 I was surprised by the vividness..
  - kybernetikos 12y ago
    I have an offline copy of wikipedia together with the images (especially for diagrams, and plant recognition) on my phone. I also have fairly detailed offline maps of most of the world (including contour lines in some places). Add some decent solar power to that, and scavenge for spare parts to keep it going, and I plan to be running a First Foundation / Oracle of Delphi pretty shortly after civilization collapse.
evincarofautumn 12y ago
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.
- scardine 12y ago
  Most of the fleet here in Brazil runs on dual combustible (ethanol or gas) and ethanol is available at every gas station. Ethanol from sugar cane is way cheaper than ethanol from corn and we have 2 crops a year (no harsh winters).
- WalterBright 12y ago
  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!
  - derekp7 12y ago
    For that you'll want the Foxfire series of books. I remember flipping through them when I was a kid -- not sure about the quality of the information from memory, but the topics covered are somewhat complete.
  - WiggleYourIndex 12y ago
    I wonder where this thread might go... Here are some of my growing fields of interest for this meta-concept, which I feel moves closer and closer with each unpublished (at least in widely circulating media) major event from our gyrating, upside down "systems of betterment" whose impending collapse will provide new opportunities in an all-encompassing global transition: water purification, rainwater collection and storage, food storage, gardening, replenishable cleaning supplies, essential body care goods, reliable cooking tools, essential clothing articles, healthcare, communication and collaboration tools (low-tech as well), microcomputing, solar electric... Our society has a twisted certification and license approach to learning, as if you need to ask permission to cross a street, instead of looking both directions... We /can/ take care of ourselves.
frankydp 12y ago
http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumber=7398 http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumb... Probably one of the better collections.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
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.
- mjevans 12y ago
  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.
  - zipwitch 12y ago
    It won't solve the fuel problem, but for metals, junkyards are pretty easy to dig up.
- WiggleYourIndex 12y ago
  Thankfully, some people already have much more reliable lifestyles on this planet. Thankfully, some people already sense coming storms (ie ecological, financial, electrical grid dependency collapse, pandemic, etc), and work on adjusting their lives for independence. Thankfully, some people end their addictions, cut out distractions, tune out mass media lies, etc to focus on what's important and build new lifestyles with beauty and abundance... Unfortunately, many more people want to stay asleep and enjoy these pretty, blinding lights before they'll notice a wider world changing around them.
- Htsthbjig 12y ago
jwatte 12y ago
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...
- raverbashing 12y ago
  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
- Shivetya 12y ago
  civil engineering books would be my bet and basic medicine like first aid
- rjsw 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- jayvanguard 12y ago
  I agree. Medicine, metal working, practical mechanics are severely underrepresented. Not to mention alternative energy sources.
stochastician 12y ago
The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Especially if we still had mammoths. http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-Macaulay/dp/1405302380 http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-Macaulay/dp/1405...
abecedarius 12y ago
It's not at the level of animal husbandry or first aid, but I'd hate to think of the Feynman Lectures being lost.
faizshah 12y ago
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 12y ago
  >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.
sparkzilla 12y ago
50 Shades of Grey
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
walterbell 12y ago
If we're starting over: Vol. 1 of Charles Singer's History of Technology, http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient-Empires/dp/019858105X http://www.amazon.com/History-Technology-Volume-Ancient-Empi... covers the period up to 500 BC.
ja27 12y ago
Back to Basics - http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-Skills/dp/0895770865/ http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-Skill... 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.
sandworm 12y ago
"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.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > The law has been part of civilization from the beginning (Hammurabi) I tend to agree that if there's a civilization, there are laws, but your example is bizarre. A quick check of wikipedia informs us that Hammurabi was born circa 1810 BC. Compare Sargon, who took his throne about 500 years prior, or Narmer, who unified Egypt over a thousand years before Hammurabi was born. And we only know about them because they left records. The Egyptians also left records of various near-eastern peoples who clearly had flourishing civilizations at the time, but left no records of themselves. These great conquerors come from a backdrop of states that are already old. Seven thousand years ago, pre-Egyptian nomads left religious art in what is now the Sahara desert (though at the time they used it to pasture their animals). Nomads aren't traditionally considered civilized; we like to use agriculture as the threshold. But those nomads surely had laws, even if you'd find them primitive, and they were organized enough to leave monuments behind and, eventually, conquer the farmers who lived along the Nile and set themselves up as the ruling class.
  - sandworm 12y ago
    Hammurabi is cited by lawyers because it demonstrates some advanced legal principals that are still with us, specifically the separation of civil and criminal law. There other, older, legal traditions but they rarely are relevant to modern jurisprudence.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Hammurabi isn't relevant to modern jurisprudence in any way that older legal codes wouldn't also be; we have inherited nothing from mesopotamian culture. People still refer to him today because for a time he was popularized as the man behind the earliest known, written legal code, but that's purely a question of journalism. Today we have even older mesopotamian legal codes, but they haven't been publicized the way Hammurabi was. And I responded to you saying that Hammurabi was the beginning of civilization, which is even more ludicrous.
cbd1984 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      "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
spc476 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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-Moore/dp/0521878586 http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John-Moo... the second edition can be had for a song.
TravisJamison 12y ago
Antifragile - To help keep civilization from needing to rebuild itself a 3rd time. http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680 http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...
- iwwr 12y ago
  What were the first two times?
  - ajcarpy2005 12y ago
    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.
  - bergie 12y ago
    I guess bronze age collapse, and the fall of Rome
qznc 12y ago
This lists seems focused on culture, not on survival or technology. Instead: http://rebuildingcivilization.com/ http://rebuildingcivilization.com/
- agumonkey 12y ago
  If I were to redesign school, this would be the spirit.
te_chris 12y ago
No Das Kapital?
- blumkvist 12y ago
  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.
Yizahi 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
eveningcoffee 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
skidoo 12y ago
The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.
noir-york 12y ago
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.
- maaku 12y ago
  Protection of the Church and feudal system?
  - noir-york 12y ago
    Don't let the political concerns of the times blind you to the core principles. With that same argument Machiavelli is not relevant because his advice was intended for a medieval Italian prince.
- selimthegrim 12y ago
  Why not the Constitution rather than Magna Carta (no article is properly necessary)? http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-carta http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-ca...
  - noir-york 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
Thiz 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I'm inclined to suggest electromagenetism, but I'm essentially agreeing with you :)
garethsprice 12y ago
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).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
teekert 12y ago
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.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Why not use wikipedia?
UhUhUhUh 12y ago
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.
ommunist 12y ago
Gosh, the "ABC" should be the No. 1 in this list.
inklesspen 12y ago
"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/
jschwartzi 12y ago
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.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
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.
oldbuzzard 12y ago
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-Production/dp/1581125666 http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Pr... [2] http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/ http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/
on_and_off 12y ago
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.
jpfr 12y ago
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_downloaddocument/9783642228490-t1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1381128-p174536437 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

118 points by Petiver 12y ago

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 12y ago
The Knowledge is the book that every library and "End of the World" kit should have in it.
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  Agree. An excellent book.

mc32 12y ago

>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 12y ago
> 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.
- mc32 12y ago
  Easy, print it. They allow it to be downloaded and printed, from what I understand --only drawback is that fast moving topics become fossilized, but all printed books are that way.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  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.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Indeed https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/568368792906153985 https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/568368792906153985 I was surprised by the vividness..
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  I have an offline copy of wikipedia together with the images (especially for diagrams, and plant recognition) on my phone. I also have fairly detailed offline maps of most of the world (including contour lines in some places). Add some decent solar power to that, and scavenge for spare parts to keep it going, and I plan to be running a First Foundation / Oracle of Delphi pretty shortly after civilization collapse.

evincarofautumn 12y ago

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.

scardine 12y ago
Most of the fleet here in Brazil runs on dual combustible (ethanol or gas) and ethanol is available at every gas station. Ethanol from sugar cane is way cheaper than ethanol from corn and we have 2 crops a year (no harsh winters).
WalterBright 12y ago
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!
- derekp7 12y ago
  For that you'll want the Foxfire series of books. I remember flipping through them when I was a kid -- not sure about the quality of the information from memory, but the topics covered are somewhat complete.
- WiggleYourIndex 12y ago
  I wonder where this thread might go... Here are some of my growing fields of interest for this meta-concept, which I feel moves closer and closer with each unpublished (at least in widely circulating media) major event from our gyrating, upside down "systems of betterment" whose impending collapse will provide new opportunities in an all-encompassing global transition: water purification, rainwater collection and storage, food storage, gardening, replenishable cleaning supplies, essential body care goods, reliable cooking tools, essential clothing articles, healthcare, communication and collaboration tools (low-tech as well), microcomputing, solar electric... Our society has a twisted certification and license approach to learning, as if you need to ask permission to cross a street, instead of looking both directions... We /can/ take care of ourselves.

frankydp 12y ago

http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumber=7398 http://www.motherearthnews.com/shopping/detail.aspx?itemnumb... Probably one of the better collections.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

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.

mjevans 12y ago
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.
- zipwitch 12y ago
  It won't solve the fuel problem, but for metals, junkyards are pretty easy to dig up.
WiggleYourIndex 12y ago
Thankfully, some people already have much more reliable lifestyles on this planet. Thankfully, some people already sense coming storms (ie ecological, financial, electrical grid dependency collapse, pandemic, etc), and work on adjusting their lives for independence. Thankfully, some people end their addictions, cut out distractions, tune out mass media lies, etc to focus on what's important and build new lifestyles with beauty and abundance... Unfortunately, many more people want to stay asleep and enjoy these pretty, blinding lights before they'll notice a wider world changing around them.
Htsthbjig 12y ago

jwatte 12y ago

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...

raverbashing 12y ago
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
Shivetya 12y ago
civil engineering books would be my bet and basic medicine like first aid
rjsw 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
jayvanguard 12y ago
I agree. Medicine, metal working, practical mechanics are severely underrepresented. Not to mention alternative energy sources.

stochastician 12y ago

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

abecedarius 12y ago

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

faizshah 12y ago

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 12y ago
>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.

sparkzilla 12y ago

50 Shades of Grey

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walterbell 12y ago

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

ja27 12y ago

Back to Basics - http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-Skills/dp/0895770865/ http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Traditional-American-Skill... 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.

sandworm 12y ago

"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.

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> The law has been part of civilization from the beginning (Hammurabi) I tend to agree that if there's a civilization, there are laws, but your example is bizarre. A quick check of wikipedia informs us that Hammurabi was born circa 1810 BC. Compare Sargon, who took his throne about 500 years prior, or Narmer, who unified Egypt over a thousand years before Hammurabi was born. And we only know about them because they left records. The Egyptians also left records of various near-eastern peoples who clearly had flourishing civilizations at the time, but left no records of themselves. These great conquerors come from a backdrop of states that are already old. Seven thousand years ago, pre-Egyptian nomads left religious art in what is now the Sahara desert (though at the time they used it to pasture their animals). Nomads aren't traditionally considered civilized; we like to use agriculture as the threshold. But those nomads surely had laws, even if you'd find them primitive, and they were organized enough to leave monuments behind and, eventually, conquer the farmers who lived along the Nile and set themselves up as the ruling class.
- sandworm 12y ago
  Hammurabi is cited by lawyers because it demonstrates some advanced legal principals that are still with us, specifically the separation of civil and criminal law. There other, older, legal traditions but they rarely are relevant to modern jurisprudence.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Hammurabi isn't relevant to modern jurisprudence in any way that older legal codes wouldn't also be; we have inherited nothing from mesopotamian culture. People still refer to him today because for a time he was popularized as the man behind the earliest known, written legal code, but that's purely a question of journalism. Today we have even older mesopotamian legal codes, but they haven't been publicized the way Hammurabi was. And I responded to you saying that Hammurabi was the beginning of civilization, which is even more ludicrous.

cbd1984 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    "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

spc476 12y ago

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 12y ago
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-Moore/dp/0521878586 http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John-Moo... the second edition can be had for a song.

TravisJamison 12y ago

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

iwwr 12y ago
What were the first two times?
- ajcarpy2005 12y ago
  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.
- bergie 12y ago
  I guess bronze age collapse, and the fall of Rome

qznc 12y ago

This lists seems focused on culture, not on survival or technology. Instead: http://rebuildingcivilization.com/ http://rebuildingcivilization.com/

agumonkey 12y ago
If I were to redesign school, this would be the spirit.

te_chris 12y ago

No Das Kapital?

blumkvist 12y ago
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.

Yizahi 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.

eveningcoffee 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

skidoo 12y ago

The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.

noir-york 12y ago

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.

maaku 12y ago
Protection of the Church and feudal system?
- noir-york 12y ago
  Don't let the political concerns of the times blind you to the core principles. With that same argument Machiavelli is not relevant because his advice was intended for a medieval Italian prince.
selimthegrim 12y ago
Why not the Constitution rather than Magna Carta (no article is properly necessary)? http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-carta http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/al-qaeda-vs-magna-ca...
- noir-york 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.

Thiz 12y ago

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 12y ago
I'm inclined to suggest electromagenetism, but I'm essentially agreeing with you :)

garethsprice 12y ago

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).

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teekert 12y ago

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.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Why not use wikipedia?

UhUhUhUh 12y ago

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.

ommunist 12y ago

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

inklesspen 12y ago

"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/

jschwartzi 12y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

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.

oldbuzzard 12y ago

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-Production/dp/1581125666 http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Pr... [2] http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/ http://www.cavemanchemistry.com/

on_and_off 12y ago

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.

jpfr 12y ago

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_downloaddocument/9783642228490-t1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1381128-p174536437 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