世界重启 – The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

我们熟知的世界已经消亡。而现在的关键问题是：接下去该怎么办？

本书是一本针对幸存者的指南，作者路易斯•达特内尔不仅探讨了如何让人们在灾难后的几个星期里活下去，更介绍了末日之后，恢复人类文明所需的那些非常基础但却最重要的知识精华：从如何发展农业、喂饱肚子，到怎样提炼矿物、制造药品，再到铺设电网、发展交通等。

这本书是一个思维实验，也是重新梳理人类文明发展的知识指南。在科学发展的今天，当我们沉浸于文明带来的便利时，或许更应该思考一下，假如文明崩溃，我们该何去何从？

《世界重启》是一本基础知识入门书，也是技术社会的重建蓝图，文明延续的关键，或许就隐藏在本书中。

How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch?

If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible—a guide for rebooting the world?

Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself?

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover.

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