#221 - Prof Lewis Dartnell - How To Rebuild Human Society After An Apocalypse

Lewis Dartnell (0:00)

Chapter one, there has been an apocalypse. The big red reset button has just been pushed.

Peter McCormack (0:05)

We wake up tomorrow, there's been some kind of apocalypse. We've got to survive. What would kill us?

Lewis Dartnell (0:10)

You want to get out of the cities as quickly as possible, because modern cities we all live in today are just bubbles of artificiality.

Peter McCormack (0:19)

I think a supermarket might last me a... It should last me a couple of years, I would have thought.

Lewis Dartnell (0:24)

The answer I came up with was an average supermarket to keep one person alive for 55 years, or 63 years if you're happy to eat all the canned dog food and cat food as well.

Peter McCormack (0:36)

If you were prepping for that, you had your bunker, what are the essential things you would take down beyond food into the bunker with you?

Lewis Dartnell (0:42)

If I was restricted to take one single item, I would take a screw thread. And I will tell you for why. We don't have that anymore. We're much more brittle as a society.

Perhaps a smaller shock could just fracture the entire thing.

Peter McCormack (0:59)

So are we both resilient and fragile?

Lewis Dartnell (1:01)

Maybe it won't be here. Probably will, but maybe, maybe it won't.

Peter McCormack (1:07)

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Peter, how are you doing? Yes, very excited to talk to you. I am partway through knowledge, as I told you.

And I think once I'm done that, I'll be going through all of your books. But I'm really interested to talk to you, because I think we're at an interesting time for civilization. We seem to be at the forefront of achieving everything that's appeared in science fiction films, and also potentially destroying humanity and civilization. And so we should probably let people know why I've asked you to come here, the civilization aspect, and then we'll get into it.

Lewis Dartnell (2:06)

Yes. So my third book that I wrote is called The Knowledge, How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. And it uses a thought experiment, uses the conceit of the loss of everything we take for granted in our everyday lives, as a starting point to looking behind the scenes of our modern world and how everything works. So page one, chapter one, there has been an apocalypse. It doesn't matter if it was a global pandemic or nuclear war or an asteroid strike or whatever, the big red reset button has just been pushed. And you are in a group of survivors that have survived the apocalypse. You're living in this devastated wasteland afterwards.

And the question that's going to be on all of your lips is, ah, what now? What would I most need to know? What I most want written down in a DIY guide? Not just to survive. I'm not really talking about bare grills, how you're just going to be with bare teeth sort of thing. But how would you go about rebuilding civilization from scratch? Could you reboot civilization in the way you might reboot a computer after it's crashed? Could you leapfrog to the most useful technologies and accelerate the rerunning of history to redevelop a technological civilization as quickly as possible? That's the idea I was playing around with.

Peter McCormack (3:23)

I think that's what hit me with the start of the book was what we have taken for granted, this kind of accumulated knowledge, experience, set of skills, technologies that we built that all just kind of work together to give us this life. If there was an apocalypse and maybe you, me and Connor are left wandering the streets, there is that survival component, but then there's also the rebuilding of civilization. Is that rebuilding of civilization really, is that biological? Is that just within us? Is that what humans are like?

Lewis Dartnell (3:52)

Well, I mean, I think so. I think we're obviously an innately curious, explorative species, otherwise we wouldn't have got where we are today. And that will continue if we ever do have to reset. But I think fundamentally people are lazy and they like to be comfortable. And almost all of the inventions and tools and technology we invent, we do it because it makes something easier that we want to be able to do. It makes us able to create more food more easily, or to be warmer, or have to work, have to labour less to do the things and provide the basic sustenance that we need.