Civilization’s Starter Kit NYT Op Ed Article

8/12/2019 Civilizations Starter Kit NYT Op Ed Article

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http://nyti.ms/1piZ6KE

SUNDAYREVIEW | OPINION | NYT NOW

Civilizations Starter KitBy 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 jokethat 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 torebuild 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
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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 contaminateyour 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 shapethat 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.


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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 aroundyou 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 somehowrelatively 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 authorof 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
http://www.nytco.com/http://the-knowledge.org/http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/


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Civilization’s Starter Kit NYT Op Ed Article