The Opération Licorne nuclear test conducted in French Polynesia on May 22, 1970 was measured at 914 kilotons Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch is the product of the imagination of astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, years of research, and several science fiction novels. Written as a manual for survival after doomsday has hit, it compiles information required to restart society, ranging from agriculture to making a radio.

Over lattes at a café in central London, Dartnell shared his post-apocalyptic thought experiment and explained why he decided to write The Knowledge.


WIRED: How did this project come about?

Lewis Dartnell: There was a question that had been bouncing around the back of my mind for quite a while along the lines of: "What are the actual fundamentals behind our civilisation?" We see a lot of stuff day-to-day, but I don't think many of us really understand how any of it works, or is built, or is constructed, or is made -- where our food comes from, where clothes come from, how materials are actually made, the metals and plastics we use, and the chemical substances we use in our lives. I just wanted to sit down and answer the thought experiment for myself: imagine this kind of apocalypse event, and civilisation has collapsed and you've survived. What do you need to know? What's the most crucial knowledge that you would need to survive and support yourself, but then more interestingly, start rebooting civilisation from scratch? How could you accelerate history the second time round?

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How do you think some common forms of technology might be used differently the second time around?

Well it turns out you can run a car, an internal combustion engine, without using fossil fuels. You can actually fuel a car with wood -- using a process called gasification. In this big thought experiment, I don't think you'd have access to crude oil again because we've already sucked up all the crude oil that was easy to get, and the only way we're still constantly producing it today is by going to really inaccessible places and using incredibly sophisticated drilling rigs to suck it up. You wouldn't be able to do that when you're back to basics, with rudimentary means. But we could still power our cars. During the Second World War, there were over one million wood-powered cars in Europe because of fuel shortages during the war. The German army ran a whole division of tanks that were wood-powered, rather than diesel-powered.


What do you think is the most important idea you included in The Knowledge?

One of the most important things that society should never forget and have to rediscover would be something like germ theory. With the idea that people get sick not because of some plague sent down from heaven, but because there are tiny things called bacteria that get inside your body and they make you sick, you could hopefully leapfrog over centuries of history. In London back in the 1800s, tens of thousands of people died of cholera because people were literally defecating in the river, and then ten yards downstream people would be dipping in a bucket and drinking from it. If you explain to people this notion of germ theory, you would cut out all of that regression, all of that pestilence and plague.

In more general terms, the one thing you would need to preserve to reboot a civilisation as quickly as possible and to accelerate that redevelopment would be the scientific method; the knowledge generation machinery used to rediscover things about the world for yourself and to fill in all the gaps.

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Dartnell forged his own steel knife with the help of a 1700s-era blacksmith Lewis Dartnell


How much of this civilisation re-booting manual did you try for yourself?

I tried to do a lot of these things myself so I could write about it from my own experience. With the author photograph at the back of the book, I was very keen that it stayed true to the premise of the whole book, that I did it myself from scratch. So you mix together all the silver chemistry to take a primitive photograph, use a rudimentary single lens camera to take that photo and then process it.

I also made a knife from scratch, with my own hands, working at a 1700s-era blacksmith. We worked at an iron forge -- we shoved this metal into a fire until it was red hot, then battered the hell out of it with a hammer and an anvil. I printed a page from the book on handmade paper, using a rudimentary printing press. In

The Knowledge, I explain how to make paper from scratch, how to make your own ink, and how to make a printing press, so the book contains inside itself the genetic instructions for its reproduction.

The Knowledge has seen a second life online, through the open forum on the project's website. How did that come about?

The Knowledge is my idea of the most important information for rebuilding civilisation, but everyone is going to have their own thoughts, their own feelings, and own expertise in this area, so I've been inviting people to come over to the website and pitch in their ideas and discuss and debate with each other.

It's taken off really nicely as well; there's a vigorous debate going on in several different sections with that discussion panel.

One thread pointed out that my idea of how you could rebuild society after an apocalypse is very similar to a sci-fi scenario where you crash-landed on a virgin, alien earth-like planet with no intelligent beings. Some readers have been working through the book and picking out things that are different on different planets, or the same on different planets, it's really quite an interesting thought experiment.

You included a quotation by Richard Feynman, who attempted to summarise human knowledge in a single sentence; do you think you can do something similar?

"If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms -- little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."


I gave the Feynman quote about the atomic hypothesis as an example of what I was trying to do, so I've expanded Feynman's one sentence that was pretty much restricted to physics into 300 pages covering all kinds of science and technology that might be useful.

I've been a bit more indulgent with word count. But rather than focusing on the atomic hypothesis, I would argue that the most useful thing to try to encapsulate and preserve and pass on to whoever survives this hypothetical cataclysm might be something like the scientific method. I wouldn't try to encapsulate knowledge itself like Feynman would have done with the atomic hypothesis, but the machinery, the method you would use to work it out for yourself again.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch by Dr. Lewis Dartnell is out now. Explore extra material, including How-To videos, at the book's website, and join the discussion on the forum - what do you think is the most crucial knowledge you'd want to preserve?