Ideas up for grabs
Manual for Starting All over Again
There are a lot of books about culture, civilization and the
development of technology, but most of them are discipline-oriented
or story-oriented. How did this or that science or industry grow,
what were the crucial inventions and ideas, who were the most
important names, etc. Whatever you are expected to know at an
examination. However, even if your grades were all A's in, say,
aerodinamics, you may not be able to put together a rudimentary
airplane, a biplane. Not from scratch.
There are several profecies about a coming disaster, and we all know
that humankind is bound to have one, relatively soon, but we do not
know what kind of disaster it's going to be. There are rumors about a
comet, an asteroid, a nuclear war, hothouse effects or the next ice
age. Technically, it can come any minute. But those who believe in
numbers and probabilities say one in a billion, one in ten billion
etc. is to be expected. The thing is, we do not precisely know where
we are now to this one billion or ten billion.
But the longer time we have the more logical it is that we should
prepare ourselves.
There are numerous projects going on worldwide which aim at the
preservation of the cultural heritage of human kind. And it is nice
to collect one copy of every great book, to collect electronic copies
of every great painting, photos of statues, buildings, cities etc.
But what do you do when, after a big disaster, you are on your own?
Once I saw a traditional cart on a remote road, with horses and
wheels. But there were rubber tires on the wheels. And I thought,
what happens when there are no more rubber tires? Who will know and
who will be able to teach the knowledge of how to make a traditional
wheel with spokes and rims? What if rubber tires are not available
anymore?
A book should be written about how to survive in a post-technological
world. How to read and write, how to make a fire and how to keep it,
how to use fire to melt metals, how to do farming without tractors
and other machines, what fruits can be eaten and what fruits cannot,
how to breed animals and how to grow vegetables, how to build a house
and other types of buildings, how to recognize the most common
diseases and how to cure the ill. We have done this before but then
we knew very little and our knowledge has built up in the course of
ten thousands of years. Right after a big disaster you may lose your
technological background but you should not lose this cumulated
knowledge.
However, it would not be enough to organize and distribute computer
databases and tutoring programs. Even if we will be able to generate
electricity (using mechanic devices like a windmill), who are going
to manufacture computer chips to replace those in used computers? I
say, we should think in education, probably mostly oral education,
since even paper-making is a complex process and needs a lot of raw
materials and special machines. Most likely we will only be able to
use clay tablets or stone. And we will have to rely upon memory again.
This manual for survival should describe the most important tricks,
methods and elementary technological processes. In English or in
native languages, to be distributed all over the world. In the case
of a big disaster it will prove itself to be much more important than
all the great books and paintings.
Related to this project is a survey, or rather a catalog, of all the
original ideas of human technology. Certain solutions showed up in
different periods of history and in different areas. For instance
attaching one object to another using rings is known to building as
well as to sailing and sawing. Or the idea of moving objects using a
continuous medium is the same for conveyor belts and machine guns.
People either borrow these tricks from other areas or they invent
them over and over again. Since textbooks on the history of
technology are also discipline-based, they usually fail to mention
that the same idea is used in other areas. Bringin these applications
together would result in a catalog of our technological heritage. And
we would see just exactly how smart humans are in the field of
inventing and adapting.
Someone should write these books.