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SUNDAYREVIEW | OPINION | NYT NOW
Civilizations Starter Kit
By LEWIS DARTNELL MARCH 29, 2014
IM an astrobiologist I study the essential building blocks of life, on this planet
and others. But I dont know how to fix a dripping tap, or what to do when the
washing machine goes on the blink. I dont know how to bake bread, let alone
grow wheat. Im utterly useless with my hands. My father-in-law used to joke
that I had three degrees, but didnt know anything about anything, whereas he
graduated summa cum laude from the University of Life.
Its not just me. Many purchases today no longer even come with an
instruction manual. If something breaks its easier to chuck it and buy a new
model than to reach for the screwdriver. Over the past generation or two weve
gone from being producers and tinkerers to consumers. As a result, I think we
feel a sense of disconnect between our modern existence and the underlying
processes that support our lives. Who has any real understanding of where their
last meal came from or how the objects in their pockets were dug out of the earth
and transformed into useful materials? What would we do if, in some science-
fiction scenario, a global catastrophe collapsed civilization and we were members
of a small society of survivors?
My research has to do with what factors planets need to support life.
Recently, Ive been wondering what factors are needed to support our modern
civilization. What key principles of science and technology would be necessary to
rebuild our world from scratch?
The great physicist Richard Feynman once posed a similar question: If, in
some cataclysm, all of 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 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.
That certainly does encapsulate a huge amount of understanding, but it also
wouldnt be particularly useful, in a practical sense. So, allowing myself to be a
little more expansive than a single sentence, I have some suggestions for what
someone scrabbling around the ruins of civilization would need to know about
basic necessities.
You would need to start with germ theory the notion that contagious
diseases are not caused by whimsical gods but by invisibly small organisms
invading your body. Drinking water can be disinfected with diluted household
bleach or even swimming pool chlorine. Soap for washing hands can be made
from any animal fat or plant oil stirred with lye, which is soda from the ashes of
burned seaweed combined with quicklime from roasted chalk or limestone.
When settling down, ensure that your excrement isnt allowed to contaminate
your water source this may sound obvious, but wasnt understood even as late
as the mid-19th century.
In the longer term, youll need to remaster the principles of agriculture and
the ability to stockpile a food reserve and support dense cities away from the
fields. The cereal crops that have sustained civilizations throughout history
wheat, rice and maize are fast growing, perfect as fodder for livestock or, after
processing, for human sustenance.
The millstone grinding grain into flour is a technological extension of our
molar teeth. And when we bake bread or boil rice or pasta, we wield the
transformative power of heat to help break down the complex molecules and
release more easily absorbed nourishment. So in a sense, the pots and pans we
use in the kitchen today are a pre-digestive system, processing what we consume
so that it doesnt poison us and maximizing the nutrition our body can extract.
Then there are the many materials society requires: How do you transform
base substances like clay and iron into brick or concrete or steel, and then shape
that material into a useful tool? To learn a small piece of this, I spent a day in a
traditional, 18th-century iron forge, learning the essentials of the craft of the
blacksmith. Sweating over an open coke-fired hearth, I managed to beat a lump
of steel into a knife. Once shaped, I got it cherry-red hot and then quenched it
with a satisfying squeal into a water trough, before reheating the blade slightly to
temper it for extra toughness.
The first thing I did when I got home was to use the knife to slice some
Cheddar and bread and make myself a grilled cheese. Unfortunately, the blade
immediately developed a ruinous crack, and Ive not had the nerve to use it
again. But I made something real with my own hands and Ive got a good idea of
how to do it better next time.
Of course, it neednt take a catastrophic collapse of civilization to make you
appreciate the importance of understanding the basics of how devices around
you work. Localized disasters can disrupt normal services, making a reasonable
reserve of clean water, canned food and backup technologies like kerosene lamps
a prudent precaution. And becoming a little more self-reliant is immensely
rewarding in its own right. Thought experiments like these can help us to explore
how our modern world actually came to be, and to appreciate all that we take for
granted.
Take, for example, plain old glass a wonder material that is somehow
relatively strong and yet perfectly transparent. The recipe to create it is simple
enough and uses some of the same ingredients as soap: a handful of silica (pure
white sand, quartz or flint), some potash or soda ash (extracted by soaking wood
or seaweed ash in water, straining the water and then boiling it down) and
quicklime (roasted chalk or limestone); mix them together and bake in a kiln.
Once the substance is fluid and bubble-free, you can form it into jars or bottles or
window panes.
Glass also happens to be a crucial material for understanding the world, in
the form of thermometers and test tubes, and even for manipulating light itself,
when shaped into lenses for microscopes and telescopes tools that are
indispensable for science, including my own field of astrobiology. I may never
have to practice the alchemy that transforms sand, soda and quicklime into this
miraculous transparent membrane, but the world outside my window feels closer
and more in focus for the knowing.
Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology research fellow at the University of Leicester and the author of the
forthcoming book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 30, 2014, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the
headline: Civilizations Starter Kit.
2014 The New York Times Company