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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Ok so now I have a dream. Is not as good as the dream the other guy had but it's my dream.

I want to build a course, or a series of courses, where one rebuilds the world. It's the sort of thing one could do slowly with one's kids.

Yes it's like that book "the knowledge" and related stuff. But Inhave done things like building a sextant to use that to measure the circumference of the earth and so on, and really I never imagined Incoukd actually build my own cpu to run my own language - but it's there.

One could literally go from fire, to solar system, to lime and then to CPUs.

The world we live in is insanely complex, but it is ... rebuildable

I guess I am inspired by the quote Feynman left on his blackboard - "that which I cannot recreate I do not understand"

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> I want to build a course, or a series of courses, where one rebuilds the world. It's the sort of thing one could do slowly with one's kids.

You can start with this book (bibliography available):

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...

See also the Primitive Technology YouTube channel:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology

You might enjoy the anime Dr Stone, which involves someone doing exactly this, but packaged in a fun almost course-like format.

Dr Stone has nothing to do with rebuilding the world. It's a fantasy and you can't build CPU from little bit of glass and copper and cook it with algae.

That's confusing, given the description of the show is "The story follows Senku Ishigami, a scientific genius who plans to rebuild civilization."

Check out "Open Source Ecology" and "Global Village Construction Set"

I participated in a couple of Marcin's workshops, AMA

also CollapseOS

I'm interested in it too for disaster recovery scenarios. Just started my HAM radio journey, seems like a community that likes to re-establish comms when everything else fails.

Ooo yes. I share your dream as well. A comprehensive guide on how to make anything from scratch would be amazing.

I guess to get started, it would be a process of reverse engineeringing to work out steps of a build, and then build a dependency tree from that.

E.g the linked guide to making a CPU depends on using some chemicals, there would need to be an explanation of how those chemicals are obtained, and then subsequently on how the equipment to facilitate that is made. Until it resolves to primative tools and processes to obtain raw material.

There’s a YouTube series, How To Make Everything (HTME) that was well along this road until a fire destroyed the guy’s studio. He’s restarted in the last year or so. It’s good fun, and showcases how difficult it is even with something as simple as casting a blade.

I wept when they posted that fire video. Such a cool channel.

A more humorous take on the subject of how to rebuild civilization from scratch, from the perspective of a time-traveler who got stuck in the past but managed to have their time-traveling machine's manual with them: "How to Invent Everything: Rebuild All of Civilization" by Ryan North - https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/

I had such high hopes for this book but it is nothing like its title implies.

It’s actually probably not possible. We’ve exhausted all the easy to find/surface layer minerals. Oil doesn’t just leak out of the ground anywhere. Iron, copper, coal, are all underground.

Right, we've made it easy, it's all on the surface now in scrapyards and landfills

</grew up watching junkyard wars and was highly dissapointed to find out the better gear was planted among the junk to make the tv show viable>

Very good point. I read Olaf Stapledon's First and Last man, a sci-fi book which describes the next few billion years for mankind and deals with this issue.

In one scenario, human society collapses, spends 80 million years living as hunter/gatherers (with some evolution) and then develops once again to a technological civilization, in part because the minerals and fossil fuels have been replenished.

We've also had a lot of time to develop new things that mean we might need oil less. Oil was (and still currently is) a necessary developmental stage. We just need to get through it.

> Oil doesn’t just leak out of the ground anywhere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep

Maybe not at current civilization scale quantities, but there is certainly enough surface metals and oil to bootstrap industry.

This is essentially Wikipedia. Just run a topological sort over the dependency graph, and you have your course.

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Wikipedia is essentially a raw dump of the knowledge, I don't think you could automatically create a course that starts from the basics until you have a CPU, the "graph" hasn't been created with that in mind, so it's not "chronological" so to say.

But, I'm happy to be proven otherwise. Maybe wikidata could be a better start, beginning with "recipes" for how to create things codified into their format.

Not sure if you're joking, but a topological sort wouldn't work because Wikipedia contains circular references.

lol

So you're saying that if I throw a wikipedia filled USB at you and go "Ok, invent a CPU from scratch," You'll be able to do it?

I have a somewhat related dream. Have you ever read "I, pencil"? https://mises.org/library/i-pencil

Pick any human artifact. The pencil might be a good start, but really I'd prefer something like the CPU.

Start with what we currently know. How do we make this thing? How do we make the tools and materials and everything else involved in making the thing? Recurse all the way down.

And then - how could we optimize that? This thing we make is part of a massive global human economy, entangled with all sorts of other things. But what if we didn't care about any of that? What parts are unnecessary? What can we simplify?

How would you make this thing "from scratch"? For example, on a desolate, uninhabited planet. What could you bootstrap locally, what is absolutely necessary to bring?

The real end goal, for me, is: how would you build a human artifact that could self-replicate on another planet? What is the simplest such artifact we could come up with?

Could you do it without any pre-existing organic life? Maybe a CPU; certainly not a pencil, if you don't have access to wood. Unless you bring seeds and whatever else you need to grow your own forests...

Another fun take on this is How To Invent Everything by Ryan North. The premise is that it's a handbook for stranded time travelers, but it covers the same ideas of building from one technology to the next.

https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/

Is the other guy this one?: https://www.youtube.com/@htme

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Afte...

You mean you want this? https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia

Play Factorio, maybe with some more intense mods.

https://github.com/civboot/civboot

Check out "The Toaster Project".

I'd recommend against this one. It's frustratingly light on actual detail and heavy on some 20-year-old's Big Thoughts.

This is where one should start these days: https://www.foxfire.org/shop/category/books/foxfire-series/

Also, this might tickle you:

https://www.eoht.info/page/Last%20person%20to%20know%20every...

> In genius studies, last person to know everything, i.e. technically “last man to know everything”, as there has never been a "last woman to know everything", possibly Hypatia, the only known purported "female universal genius", aside, is a title or epitaph that has been attributed to a number of individuals over the years.

> At least four, as shown adjacent, namely: Thomas Young, Joseph Leidy (IQ:150|#439), who built on Goethe's morphology work, and Athanasius Kircher, and Enrico Fermi, have had books written about them, with the epitaph "last man to know everything" attributed or affixed to their name. [7]

> Sometime between 1700 to 1900, predominately, people began to profess the view that the body of "known knowledge" had become so large that it was no longer possible for one person to know everything. To situate this postulate in the context of a date, French philosopher Pierre Levy argues, in his 1994 Collective Intelligence, that the publication of Frenchman Denis Diderdot and Jean d’Almbert’s Encyclopedie (1751-1772) marks “the end of an area in which a single human being was able to comprehend the totality of knowledge.”

> Humboldt is one of the cited "last persons to know everything" (below); a Cattell 1000 (top 100); was one of the first to propose that South America and Africa were both joined; in 1797, in Jena, with his brother Wilhelm, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Goethe, the four discussed, in Goethe's own words, “all of nature from the perspectives of philosophy and science”.

I wouldn't take the EOHT website very seriously, it's just the opinions of one guy. He also seems to be only acquainted with +3SD to +4SD people, seeing how he considers being religious a detriment to one's "rationality".

Also, IMO such a pursuit is in vain unless you're someone that can actually manage such a thing. If you were, you would be at least a +5SD person who had a stable childhood and was studious, and wasn't socially excluded. All very rare, and the combination all but unheard of. Real polymaths "just do it", they aren't just completing a game. I've known one guy with a purported +6SD IRL and a handful of other +4SD people, and to say they're "smart" is understating it. They have to translate to get through. Writing a book for the masses isn't something they'd like to do, unless it came with social clout that could improve their state while still being an agreeable compromise.

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