The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Read Online Free PDF Page A

enormous coronal mass ejection from the Sun. A particularly violent solar burp would slam into the magnetic field around our planet, set it ringing like a bell, and induce enormous currents in the electricity distribution wires, destroying transformers and knocking out electrical grids across the planet. The global power blackout would disrupt the pumping of water and gas supplies and the refining of fuel, as well as the production of replacement transformers. With such devastation of the core infrastructure of modern civilization without any immediate loss of life, the collapse of social order would soon follow, and the roving crowds would rapidly consume the remnant supplies and so precipitate a subsequent mass depopulation. At the end, survivors would still encounter a world without people, but one that has now also been stripped bare of any resources that would have offered them a grace period for recovery.
    While the dramatic scenario favored by many post-apocalypticmovies and novels may be the collapse of industrial civilization and social order, forcing survivors to engage in an increasingly frantic struggle for dwindling resources, the scenario that I want to focus on is the inverse: a sudden and extreme depopulation that leaves the material infrastructure of our technological civilization untouched. The majority of humanity has been erased, but all of the stuff is still around. This scenario presents the most interesting starting point for the thought experiment on how to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization from scratch. It grants the survivors a grace period to find their feet, preventing a degenerative slide too far, before they need to relearn all the essential functions of a self-supporting society.
    In this sense, the “best” way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic. The perfect viral storm is a contagion that combines aggressive virulence, a long incubation period, and near 100 percent mortality. This way, the agent of the apocalypse is extremely infectious between individuals, takes a little while for its sickness to kick in (so that it maximizes the pool of subsequent hosts that are infected), but results in certain death in the end. We have become a truly urban species—since 2008 more than half of the global population lives in cities rather than rural areas—and this crammed density of people, along with fervent intercontinental travel, provides the perfect conditions for the rapid transmission of contagions. If a plague like the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the European population (and probably a similar proportion across Asia) from 1347 to 1351, were to strike today, our technological civilization would be much less resilient. *
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    WHAT, THEN, is the minimum number of survivors of a global catastrophe that is sufficient for humanity to have a feasible chance of not just repopulating the world but being able to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization? To put it another way: What is the critical mass to enable a rapid reboot?
    There are two extremes on the spectrum of surviving populations, which I will call the “Mad Max” and “I Am Legend” scenarios. If there is an implosion of the technological life support system of modern society but no immediate depopulation (such as would be triggered by a coronal mass ejection), most of the population survives to rapidly consume any remaining resources in fierce competition. This wastes the grace period, and society promptly descends into
Mad Max
–style barbarism and a subsequent mass depopulation, with little hope of rapidly bouncing back. If, on the other hand, you are the sole survivor in the world, or at least one of a small number of survivors so dispersed that they are unlikely to stumble across one another during their lives, then the notion of rebuilding civilization, or even recovering the human population, is nil. Humanity hangs on by a single thread and is inevitably doomed when this