The A.R.K. Project (Apocalypse Reboot Kit)
The basic idea is to categorize different apocalyptic scenarios (zombies, ww3, comet, biohazard wipe-out, etc) and develop 'kits' to bring back civilization. Some kits could be quite small, maybe a collection of books on how to get power stations back up and running, etc (for scenarios where basically only people got wiped out)to full on room sized kits which may have to go back to the very basics, - teaching people how to read, how to extract ore from the ground and so on.
I thought it could make for an interesting forum based site, with discussions about what would go into each kit, finding old books like the one mentioned in the fine article all the way up to philosophical discussions regarding would you want to reintroduce religion to a primitive society, if not, how would you deal with man's instinct to inquire to the unknown?
I may still try to get it up and running one day...
I've always loved the idea. If you could somehow finance it with Bitcoin, it would be a perfect homage to Stephenson :)
The bitcoin idea is great, may have to add that
Anyone got a link?
While it's surely not wholly accurate, everything related to the material science and technology level is at least plausible.
http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...
The world gets destroyed as we know it, how to use a lathe is the least of your problems.
Open your fridge, pick anything from it. Think of the supply chain and layers upon layers of society that was needed to get that to you. You can now be, fearful that in an apocalypse event all that wouldn't be there and you'd be stuffed (which is perfectly correct reasoning) or you can appreciate the world as it is now and how it probably will be tomorrow.
Even if you abstract out segments (I'll just buy screws from a screwmaker) that doesn't mean the screwmaker doesn't avoid doing the work. Someone got to make the machine that made the screws. Or the machine that made the machine that made the screws.
Eventually you start thinking about mining engineering problems which is also fun, in conventional definition and DF.
More importantly this is exactly how a design engineer thinks. Exactly. I want a IC fabrication thingy. Well that would need X, Y, and Z, each of which need... and you quit designing small parts when mass production makes it impractical to make your own SHCS to assemble the parts. And if the math shows you're better off bolting a COTS subassembly on, you do it instead of making the parts, or you're better off making your own leadscrew threads you do that. But fundamentally for the first steps its the same.
The other thing is supply chains rarely fail completely but partially fail every day. You may need to replace the ball bearing in the headstock of your lathe and the replacement may no longer be COTS. Turn out bodging a different bearing might be a wise idea. You just never know in advance if you'll be rigging up your own babbit bearing or creating your own half-nut, so what not think about the whole thing.
As an OCD fixation it could get annoying, but for bored daydreams it beats watching Oprah reruns on TV.
In the initial post-collapse scenario there'd be a massive die-off. Cities would be impossible to live in, only those with access to water supplies and crop packages would get to live. Those in the third world would, ironically, be much better placed than those in developed countries from the perspective of not noticing things going sideways.
The common theme, regression to more local form of government, i.e. feudalism, would probably play out.
To build back up from there would take hundreds of years. You'd have to be in a position to re-establish supply chains. Which would require both the ability to organise on a significant level and the ability to have a crop surplus to support non farming specialists.
The saving grace would be the existence of certain select bits of knowledge; the idea of levers, basic mathematics entrenched in a very efficient number system, simple bits of tech like heliographs and one time pads, the printing press. Stuff that, if you're aware it's possible, you can make with relatively little effort. And social themes, like the idea of loans and relatively free trade that allow innovation to happen, the scientific methods - stuff like that.
I don't think that having books about how to make a machine shop would honestly make that much difference. We could work that stuff out for ourselves by the time we were in a position to operationalise it.
Hundreds of years, most of which would be things like getting agriculture in place, waiting for the population to grow to a decent size - things like that - rather than reinventing stuff.
I lack the knowledge to build a high performance modern internal combustion engine, for example. But the idea is enough to start someone on figuring out the basics much faster than the initial invention even if all other knowledge of it was lost. And in the meantime, a steam engine is "trivial" and easy to fuel. Heck, you'd be able to find even school children with a sufficient if basic understanding of old iron making processes to kickstart metal-making processes if need be. And understanding even something as basic as how a bicycle dynamo works allows you to bootstrap an electricity supply.
I wouldn't be able to build an advanced chip fab, but I vaguely remember enough beginning electronics that I'd know roughly what to experiment with to figure out how to get to working transistors, diodes and resistors. And I know enough to start looking at the right things to be able to etch basic circuit boards. And just knowing the idea of photo-litography and scaling down a mask gets you far towards figuring out how to create basic circuits. It'd still take a lot of work and a long time, but nowhere near as long as it took to get there initially.
And so on. Even if we did not just lose all the technology, but also "lost" all the experts who could otherwise fill in vastly more details than people with the pop-sci version of the knowledge of the fields, there are so many areas like this where understanding the basics and knowing the principles if not the implementation of what has been proven to work can massively short-circuit the process.
We would certainly face massive setbacks, but there is also another issue here: The resources required.
Even if we had the knowledge to continue to make high end CPUs, if we lose the fabs, we don't want to go straight back to trying to build a high end chip fab for the simple reason that it would take an immense amount of other technology and resources, while we could stand up the pre-requisites for producing simple, 1970's level boards, components and even chips in a tiny fraction of the time and with far more manageable resources and already start to reap a massive amount of benefits, including tools to help substantially speed up the effort of bringing up the next iteration.
There exists formally proved knowledge that pretty much the ideal liquid coolant for your internal combustion engine is 50:50 ethylene glycol and water. If all that formal knowledge is lost it'll make future progress difficult, but at least gut knowledge that it works would save a lot of time bootstrapping.
This is the origin during warfare of stealing the oppositions machinery and reverse engineering it. If it was faster and easier to work from first principles, the winners of wars would tend to do that instead of reverse engineering.
How long would it take for the world to come back from that without access to our current electronic tools and online repo of limitless knowledge? Many fundamental things would have to be re-learned.