There's a book (ISBN 978-0143127048):
> Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?
> Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment?
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/
Of course it's at layman's level of understanding, so further resources would be needed to get all the details.
I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. It's my understanding that there aren't many easily accessible metal deposits left, as there would have been thousands of years ago.
Covered in the book: recycle first, especially early in the post-collapse world when there may be a lot of stuff just sitting around.
Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books.
Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.
A further improvement would be to build a small community that practices these skills and tries to be as independent as possible from the current grid. These are all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult than the last but just imagine how much more difficult it would be to bootstrap society in a real SHTF scenario.
One step above the "small community of off-the-grid preppers" would be to come up with ways to make today's societies more resilient to systemic hick-ups, small and large, using either the means available already today or those which are very close in the technology tree.
Doing so would require a lot of decentralization, e.g. by localizing production of electricity and other consumables and making these smaller units more autonomous. Think not big cities with a power plant each, but rather groups of houses sharing solar panels and a wind mill.
Then again, this would probably be a kind of a pipe dream, as decentralization is by definition not completely under centralized control. This creates all kinds of friction. For example, if everyone produced their own electricity locally, what would the power companies do? And what would the state do with the lost tax money? There are plenty of problems like this, and I doubt one can find a win-win situation where the nowadays centralized things would not lose in some way.
and tcp/ip was literally built for nuclear war.
This would be like tech prepper paradise.
We could sync our tech trees and rebuild!
I mean, during a nuclear war, the networks would only need to stay working until a counterattack could be coordinated and launched.
After that point, the devastation would be so large planetwide that I think any potential TCP/IP users roaming the irradiated wastelands looking for food while coughing up blood would have other things on their mind than network access in any case.
For smaller scale events, sure, but while the networking design might be robustness-focused, there is still a huge amount of auxiliary stuff required, these need power and cooling, maintenance and administration, repairs, and so on.
Some parts of the internet system might be robust and resilient, but the whole system certainly isn't.
But this is one of the best uses of a Raspberry Pi. A Pi with an external USB drive and a small display will run off solar battery power, but still have enough storage for a complete Manual for Rebuilding Everything.
Add some EMP protection [1] and update the Manual from GitHub once a month or so, and you're set.
[1] And food.
However, I don't think it'd work for the long term given a suitably large catastrophy. This may sound like a No True Scotsman argument so let's just for the sake of argument define "suitably large" as "permanently disrupts the current industry base for things like chip fabrication facilities".
Once the tiny computer and/or its peripherals fail for whatever reason, such as simple wear and tear, that's it -- no new parts will be available for the more advanced components. Spare parts could be scavenged, but even that is a limited resource, and will just push forward the moment when the reference library goes away. At that point it had better be either useless or fully memorized.
So I think books are better for the longer term. Of course, books are brittle too in different ways, but they don't need to be paper books... A book could be printed on Tyvek like some hiking maps are; Tyvek doesn't mind water and can be folded and doesn't rip so easily.
Please note I might be biased since I really love books :)
ok, maybe not "find out" but... speculate?
Cellular networks have been resilient because they're possibly distributed mesh networks. I'm pretty sure the carriers have some gurus who officially or unofficially have figured out what happens.
DSL/cable type networks might be different.
I'm pretty sure dns and similar systems are widely distributed.
I wonder if a proper analogy might be the roadways. Even though one road or freeway might be blocked, people will be able to drive around and (maybe) get through. Who knows, maybe there are some "blocked mountain crossing" equivalents with the internet.
On a personal level, a laptop, a cloned git repository and a solar panel. :)
Or maybe you're more inclined towards a "FM 21-76 US ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL" kind of project?
Laser print that on acid-free archival quality paper, bind and put in a dark, dry place and it'll outlive us all.