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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

There's a book about this! Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge". I'm not saying it's actually a real answer, but it's fun in a sort of mental Dwarf Fortress kind of way.

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A similar book is Ryan North's "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler." It is framed as part of a user manual for a rental time machine that can travel as far back as 12,100,000 BCE and return to the present day. Should the time machine break during a visit to the past, the "Repair Guide" section of the manual helpfully explains: "There are no user serviceable parts inside ... ." The rest of the manual (about 400 pages) "contains all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, writing, culture, facts, and figures that are required for one human—without any specialized training—to build a civilization from the ground up."

I read that book cover to cover when it came out and it was pretty cool. It won’t get us back to advanced semiconductors because there is just too much to reinvent to get there but it would get us back to 1930s type lifestyle with modern niceties on top.

The Knowledge was nice, but I found Ryan North's book to be much better, at least as a book. Far funnier, with a very nice through line of laughing at how slow humans were to come up with some pretty obvious ideas. (Often, humanity invented something as a toy before realizing, a hundred+ years later, that it could be used for real.)

I like The Knowledge the same way I like the US version of "The Office", in that any time I just want something on so I can shift my brain off whatever it's jammed up on, I can start it up at any point in the middle and just play it (the audiobook, of course).

I don't know that I thought it was a great book, but it was a book-length description of a version of Dwarf Fortress I would definitely play. :)

The Knowledge also works with a slightly different set of constraints, in that it's explicitly about rebooting --- that takes a lot of fossil fuel options off the table, for instance, because all the easy-to-get coal and oil has been taken.

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